


The Surrender of James Hathaway

by divingforstones



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Community: lewis_challenge, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, Multi, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-03-25 12:50:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 41,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3811156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/divingforstones/pseuds/divingforstones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And then Robbie finds James’s head has suddenly returned to his shoulder, James’s face turned in so his expression is hidden from both of them. <i>Ah, lad.</i> He’s just in a right, silent state.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mazily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mazily/gifts).



> This was originally posted as part of the 2014 Exchange on the Lewis_Challenge LJ Comm and I'm very belatedly getting around to bringing it over here. Many thanks to wendymr for giving such much-appreciated and helpful thought, encouragement and advice to this whole fic.
> 
> There are brief mentions of a traffic accident near the start of this fic - nothing graphic.
> 
> This is set post-Season 8

It’s an oddly familiar quiet knock that rouses them from the half-drowsy comfort of a late Friday evening. It resonates on some deeper level with Robbie, as Laura’s head comes up off his shoulder, listening too, a slight frown evident on her face, even in the reduced illumination of flickering firelight and television and the steadier soft light of the lamps.

Because as she gets up, her eyebrows still querying this odd bypassing of their doorbell, and Robbie reaches for the remote to turn down the volume, the knock comes again, and this time it stirs a memory from a couple of years ago. And Robbie rises to his feet, drops both hands gently on Laura’s shoulders to still her movement and heads for the door himself. Because that’s the knock that Robbie’s sergeant used to rhythm on the interior door of Robbie’s flat, a home or two back now. James, alerting Robbie to his presence of an evening, when he’d arrive over, filled with the energy of inspiration on a case, using his key to the exterior door of the block as he’d been told to and then his distinctive tap alerting Robbie in undemanding fashion to his waiting presence.

And it is James he finds standing motionless on the doorstep, looking soaked through, as the rain, visible only around him, patterns down within the inverted funnel Robbie has created by clicking on the harsh exterior light. There’s something up with his eyes. They don’t quite meet Robbie’s even as James seems to look straight at him. He looks quite stunned.

“James? What’s wrong? You’re—get in here.” But James doesn’t move, his gaze still hard to catch, as his eyes move about too rapidly.

“I know it’s late, I’m sorry,” he starts.

Robbie reaches out and pulls him gently through the door. James stumbles slightly over the threshold, so he keeps hold of his upper arm, wet wool and the firm feel of James beneath it, while he pushes the door shut with his free hand and a soft click. Then he draws him into the living room where Laura is standing, waiting. James is trying to apologise again. There’s a touch on Robbie’s other arm, Laura’s hand warm through his shirtsleeve. “I’ll make him tea,” she murmurs. James’s head turns briefly towards her as she disappears.

“James?” Robbie tries again, as they’re left alone.

“I was—” His voice is quite controlled. Quite neutral and quite wrong. “I was on the M40 and there was a collision, just ahead. So I was trying—before traffic and the paramedics got there—I was trying—but—” He can’t seem to get the words out. Then his shoulders drop and he summarises to some spot behind Robbie’s shoulder, for all the world as if he’s reporting the aftermath of an incident to Robbie as his inspector again. “Driver of the first vehicle: critical injuries, did not regain consciousness at the scene. Back seat passenger: minor injuries. Front seat passenger in second vehicle: severe injuries.”

“Ah, Christ. James.” Robbie, well able to read between the lines there, releases James’s arm only to pull him into a rough hug. Surprisingly—because they don’t do this—James just submits to it, dropping his head in one brief cut of a movement so that his forehead touches lightly on Robbie’s shoulder. Robbie becomes aware that the rain, carried in by James’s damp, chilled body, is soaking gently into his shirt. He raises one hand to rub gently against the wet wool of that coat, between James’s shoulder blades, unsure if the touch is penetrating either through the coat or James’s state of shock. James isn’t returning the clumsy embrace, but he’s slumped enough against Robbie so that Robbie can see over that blond head as Laura reappears.

There’s the gentle sound of a kettle roiling slowly to a boil in the brightly lit kitchen behind her. And he can see from her, the blue of her eyes deepening in sympathy, that she’s heard enough of James’s explanation to understand what’s happening. It’s a little startling to have James suddenly in the clasp of Robbie’s arm after that other, lighter, blonde head that had been resting against his shoulder only minutes before. Robbie suddenly becomes aware of standing there before Laura, holding James, which feels a little—no earthly reason why it should, and especially not under these circumstances—but a little discomfiting. Guilt-inducing, he’d have said if that wasn’t so obviously ridiculous.

But Laura’s gaze is purely focused on James.

“Back-seat passenger in first vehicle was a minor,” James says suddenly. And then Laura is right there too, her hand joining Robbie’s on James’s back. It’s her added touch that seems to put the finishing touch to James’s painfully tight composure, because he takes a series of deep, jagged, effortful breaths right against Robbie’s shoulder. Then he raises his head, straightening. But Laura doesn’t drop her hand in response, as Robbie does, she’s pressing it into the small of James’s back now, drawing his focus in the midst of his struggle, because he turns his gaze slowly towards her. Laura just gazes back at him.

“Kettle’s boiled, love,” she says and Robbie, taken aback, realises that that’s his cue to go, to leave James for some reason to Laura, who is, of course, better at this sort of thing but—well, this is James, isn’t it? He’s Robbie’s to sort out, if and when James will let him. But Laura is gently prompting James further into the living room, so—

Is he that bad that her doctor’s instincts are taking over? Robbie wonders, as he automatically goes about the routine of finding mugs and dropping teabags in, hearing murmurs that seem to be solely Laura’s inside in the living room. James seems shell-shocked in a way that—well, Robbie reasons, how long has he spent on the hard shoulder of the motorway before the first-response vehicles fought their way through the building, chaotic post-accident traffic in this freezing rain? Before anyone else who was trained to help had arrived, as opposed to willing but panicked bystanders. While the scene James could do little about played out with him right in the middle, his own desperate divided efforts between two sets of car occupants obviously achieving nothing he can take any comfort from just now. And dealing with a child in the back of one car.

Robbie returns to them, bearing three mugs balanced a little precariously. His own tea, visually indistinguishable from Laura’s equally-milked but less sugared one when he’s used identical mugs, is held in one hand and the handles of James’s contrasting black-tea-one-sugar and Laura’s tea are held in the other. James’s has a much more generous spoonful of sugar tonight than he’d normally accept. He’s sitting on the couch now, coat off, leaning forward. He’d been casually dressed under the coat, in jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt. And the coat hasn’t saved his clothes from getting damp either. But Laura’s hand has returned to his back as if she’s applying necessary pressure to a wound. And they’re sitting in silence now with the images on the TV cheerfully ceding one to the next, unattended to in its corner.

Robbie places the mugs on the coffee table, his own within reach of the chair that James normally slouches in, which Robbie will take instead tonight. But he catches Laura’s slight frown, directed at him as he straightens. Her eyes glance to show him where to sit. Oh. And when Robbie drops down on the other side of James, James turns his gaze to look at him. And then Robbie finds James’s head has suddenly returned to his shoulder, James’s face turned in so his expression is hidden from both of them. _Ah, lad._ He’s in a right, silent state. It seems best to just join him in his silence for a while. Laura must feel the same, because she says nothing for a bit too, just looks at Robbie, pure rueful compassion, until James gives a deep sigh, rousing her.

“You’re still soaked, James, come on. Hot shower and Robbie will look out something of his for you.”

James sits up again abruptly, suddenly resolute. “No. Thank you. Sorry. It’s all right. You’ve both been—”

“James. Come on,” Laura says softly.

“I should be getting home…” He’s retreating firmly back into his normal, far more controlled mode.

And Laura just overrides it. “But you're not going anywhere tonight,” she says in absolute certainty.

James’s slightly startled eyes meet Robbie’s. Robbie grins at him. “You're on your own, lad, if you want to try arguing with her,” he informs James cheerfully.

He means it, though.

===

Laura’s looking thoughtful. Robbie comes back downstairs to find her curled on the couch with the television off now, nursing her tea and contemplating a fire which is currently dampened down, stoked with fresh logs that are lying, smouldering gently at the rapidly-blackening tips, waiting for the flames to take proper hold. She rouses herself as he settles back down beside her. “Is the heater in that spare room turned on?”

“It’s warm in there,” Robbie reassures her. He’s got something else on his mind. “Why d’you think he’s so—I mean, not that that wouldn’t be bad to deal with but James—he’s coped with far worse.” Although partly what he’s really wondering is how bad this had to have hit James for him to land on their doorstep, almost seeking help. It’s occurred to Robbie that their house is far closer to the M40 than James’s flat and, while that shouldn’t be the only reason, and James should, of course, just come here to them—Robbie has to reluctantly admit to himself that it’s a surprise that he did.

Laura turns a little further to face him, one arm up on the back of the couch. “He was off-duty, though, Robbie. This hour of the night, out there by himself. He may have gone into automatic, efficient mode, doing everything he should, as soon as he came across the scene. But his coping skills didn’t catch up in time. His defences were down. It happens. It happens to doctors sometimes when they’re ambushed by a medical emergency when they’re just not in professional mode. He had no time to prepare himself at all.”

Robbie grimaces, unsure, considering this, recalling the various times over the years when a situation had called upon him to act in his official capacity when he wasn’t expecting it.

“You may not have experienced it that way, Robbie. You’re a copper through and through. It sits easily with who you are. But James—he has to put up more of his defences to do his job. He does it well, I know. But it takes more out of him than you, partly for that reason. You know that.” He does. With the recognition of something he wouldn’t have voiced but now that he hears it, it’s with the undeniably clear ring of truth. “Must be exhausting for him, sometimes,” Laura adds. He knows that too.

“That why you took over?”

“I know. I wasn’t thinking about it, really,” she says, frowning. “Just seemed important that I did. It’s good he felt he could come here. I don’t want him feeling he can’t because of me.”

So she knows that James very easily might not have, too. “He knows he’s welcome here,” Robbie asserts, although which one of them he’s trying to convince, he’s not sure.

“He knows it, yes. Do you think he believes it? He never seeks it himself. Even though he relaxes into our company when he is here. But he never initiates it, all the same. And he used to, with you, didn’t he? When you lived alone?”

“Well, he’d generally have had something to share on a case then—” James had generally had some pretext, even if it was just an odd idea that had seemingly taken him. And he’d walk on in, past Robbie when he opened the door, talking about his latest theory, feeling no apparent need to stand on ceremony with an actual greeting, nabbing a beer from the fridge if he wasn’t casually bearing some himself, and dropping down on Robbie’s couch, arguing away.

It used to amuse Robbie, those sudden arrivals. James continuing on a conversation they’d been having a couple of hours previously as if they’d never paused. Had that been James’s way of getting past any awkwardness about showing up on Robbie’s doorstep? He’d never needed a reason as far as Robbie was concerned—it had felt natural to have him around again after their day, easing into the evening as their conversation wandered away from the case in hand. James settling, and any minor conflicts from earlier fading companionably into perspective as he’d slouch down beside Robbie and turn his mind to poking fun at the likes of Robbie’s television-watching choices instead. And he’d turn a grin or a full-blown smirk on Robbie, as he shifted comfortably next to him, mocking Robbie with easy familiarity.

There’s the distant reassuring hum of the shower upstairs and it’s Laura who shifts beside him on the couch now, setting her mug down on the coffee table, and angling herself to face him again. “I think he must miss that. Being your sergeant and belonging to you like that. Far more than he’d ever be willing to acknowledge.”

“Maybe,” Robbie owns, watching as the smaller, brightest flames start to lick the base of the neat pyramid structure Laura has built, logs tilted against each other. Because when he looks at things that plainly, he has to admit that that is different now.

Laura glances at him. “Or than you’re willing to acknowledge either, come to that,” she says rather pointedly. “He was used to taking care of you. Just in little ways, Robbie. But they may have meant a fair bit to him. And then we got together and now he can’t. And he missed the whole transition of that happening, he avoided it one way or another, through being away.”

Robbie feels a frown stiffen his face. “Well, he’d left the force, you know what happened there, he needed that break, and off he went—” It’s not, in the general scheme of things, that long since James had reached a point where he’d been unable to keep going with the job. Which makes the state he’s in now all the more anxiety-provoking.

“Yes. And being burnt-out wasn’t the only reason for that. You let him know that you were seriously thinking of leaving your partnership. You tried to move him on from it, to sort him out, with urging him to go for promotion, he resisted that, and then, when something happened that he struggled to cope with, he left. Instead of finding a way to go on, maybe at personal cost to himself, like he always had before. I’m not saying that his taking a break was a bad idea. Just that you’re far more implicated in his choice than you’re willing to allow.”

James, on a bench beside Robbie, looking out over a green college lawn, his frown of concern as he waited to work out what had disturbed Robbie and prompted this talk. His instant sympathy over Jack’s hospitalisation. And then his momentary stilling beside Robbie as Robbie had said that that was it. For him and the job. That he was changing his priorities. And James had offered no resistance, just kind reassurance that he was sure Laura would let Robbie put her first. Until Robbie had turned his focus to the opportunity that this should offer James—and instead he’d been met with _It just wouldn’t feel right if you went, for me to stay._ Could he have delivered more of a blow to James than he’d thought there? Wouldn’t he have noticed? And what had Robbie told him in response— _You're ready to go and do this on your own—so go and do it._

“Worked out all right for him with his promotion in the end,” Robbie says, uncomfortable at being confronted with all this. Because there’s that restless doubt rising up again that had assailed Robbie during those months when James was away, mainly about whether James would come back at all or just keep—well, walking, as it turned out. Walking away. Robbie’s not about to relive those anxieties, offering them up to Laura’s sharp scrutiny. “And he’s come back and settled down again.”

“Well, he came back, yes, and we had set up home together. And there wasn’t—that place for him any more.”

“Now, hold on—”

“I don’t mean it like that, Robbie. I know full well you try to give him what you’ve always tried to. But he lost his place looking out for you and protecting you. Which used to ground him. And gave him something more than you realise.”

He’s not quite sure how their discussion has fallen into her stirring up these deeper concerns but seeing James in this state has stirred something in her too and she’s intent on discussing it, in a way that she hadn’t been while James was gone. She’s making it difficult for Robbie to put those worries back to rest as he’s managed to do since James’s return. Since Robbie’s own return to working with James.

“Robbie, think about what he did for you for years. I know how things were for you when you first came back from overseas. And he just went ahead and attached himself to you and supported you almost from the off—like he was just drawn silently to you and guarded you, that was what it looked like from the outside.”

She doesn’t know the half of it, really. She knows what James had done with Monkford. She doesn’t know about the hours in Oswald Cooper’s basement when James had seemed unable to leave, joining Robbie in a futile, pointless search as the worst desperation of Robbie’s grief rose up and took hold of him again. She doesn’t know about James’s immediate, furious protection whenever someone like Ursula Van Tessel came near to probing at Robbie’s loss. Nor about the night that James had spent trying to put back together the pieces of an old case in his own way, seemingly wanting to do anything to help, once he’d learnt about what had happened to Robbie during that case at St Matilda’s—which, come to think of it, James had only found out about as Laura had cued him in on that.

James isn’t the only one who’d kept watch. They’d conspired more than Robbie had realised until he’d really come out of the end of that long tunnel.

And Robbie, feeling Laura’s gaze resting on him silently now, as he himself watches the play of the flames starting to consume the logs properly, becomes vaguely aware that that distant hum of the shower must have ceased at some point, unnoticed. James, upstairs. Probably still in that state that’s not unlike how he could get in the aftermath of certain cases, really. When some aspect of what had happened used to touch something off within him that all Robbie’s gruff teasing at him couldn’t quite reach. But he’d known it used to soothe James in some ways, underneath it all, sorted him out a bit, just keeping him close by.

One log, not as steadily set against the others, tumbles sideways into the waiting flames. And Laura moves her head a little sideways, considering Robbie in a way that he knows means she has something to say that she’ll watch his reaction to. “Do you know what he said to Jean when the two of us got together?” she asks.

Robbie stares at her. He can’t actually conceive of James saying anything to Innocent about Robbie and Laura. To Innocent? “There’s no way that James—”

“In the White Horse. When he came back from Kosovo. And they saw us,” Laura clarifies. Oh. “He said _I turn my back for five minutes…”_

“That would’ve been a joke—”

“Yes, that’s what Jean took it as. She thought it was funny. I don’t.”

Robbie moves restlessly, seeking another focus for his gaze in the flames, unsure what to do with this. He remembers Laura in the loose circle of his embrace in the pub that evening, after they’d broken apart, her eyes roving over Innocent and barely stopping, to look at James instead, disconcerted.

“Well—took him aback a bit, probably.”

“Yes. And if I’d known he was there—” Laura’s voice says slowly. But when his head turns back towards her, she’s the one focusing on the fire now. “I would’ve broken it to him a lot more gently than that. I mean—I would have if I were you. And I still wish we had.”

“What—exactly—are you saying?” Robbie asks warily.

But Laura is reaching her hand to his arm, stopping him, listening. There’s the telltale creak of that step, third from the top of the stairs, as James approaches, and then Laura is straightening to smile over the back of the couch at him as he reappears.

“You do look like you could do with something stronger than tea, James,” she says. “Robbie—”

“Aye.” And Robbie, thoroughly distracted, gets up to search out both the whiskey bottle and a proper cut-crystal glass for it from the drinks cabinet.

“Medicinal,” he hears Laura persuading James who is murmuring some demurral about whatever wine they have open being fine. “Good for shock, James.”

That suddenly sounds like a good idea to Robbie, then. “Think I’ll keep you company in one,” he says, turning his head to James. But it’s Laura who catches his eye, intercepting this effort at distracting himself with a look that just stops short of an eye roll. A look that’s telling him that he may need more than the whiskey to buffer him against the rest of what she’s got to say.

===

It’s going to be one of those nights. It’s only partly the urge for a nicotine fix that has driven James out into the back garden barely a restless half-hour after Laura had bid him goodnight at the top of the stairs, and checked he had everything he needed, while Robbie locked up. They’d all pretty much given up on the evening shortly after he’d shared that nightcap with Robbie.

And grateful as James had been for the burn of the whiskey and the warmth of the borrowed clothes, he’d been relieved too, already finding a certain agitation starting to overtake him. But it had failed to settle as he’d achieved solitude and the shelter of darkness and he’d found himself lying restless, the prospect of sleep receding into a distant, impossible goal.

He may as well be here as in his own flat. Except that there, at least, he can put on music or channel some of his nervous energy into his guitar. But he finds it’s not so bad in this garden. The rain has cleared and torn clouds, a darker navy than the dark blue of the sky, pass restlessly overhead, mirroring the rapid pace of his thoughts.

He shoves one hand down into the pocket of his still-damp coat, avoiding the mental images of the hard shoulder of that motorway in the relentless rain and the dark, and the memory of that helpless confusion of being the only one there who could do anything for what had seemed like an age… He propels the wooden chair he’s slouched in up and down with the movement of one foot against the planks of the decking, and gazes up through the beams of the pergola that neatly bisects his view of the sky into differently-patterned squares, each interspersed with the twigs of the climber and the shadows of the leaves that remain. It’s the first weekend in November.

It’s the return of the rain, cold hard drops on his upturned face, startling him, that sends him hastily to his feet and heading back to the house. But as he passes under the ivy-framed window of Robbie and Laura’s bedroom, a window that’s obviously shut, and cloaked behind closed curtains, he catches the sound of their voices and his feet stutter to a halt, as he frowns upwards at the source of this conundrum. There’s a vent, half-hidden by the ivy, which must be set in the outer wall of their bedroom. And the odd acoustics of this old house mean that as James stands directly under it, Robbie’s voice drifts down as clearly as if he’s right beside James in the darkened garden. He’s in full stubborn-assertion mode.

“Just because you can make the facts fit a theory doesn’t mean it’s accurate.”

And then there’s Laura. “Okay. On an intuitive level then. Are you honestly telling me that you don’t recognise the truth of this? Deep down, Robbie. You know I’m right.”

There’s a silence and James recollects himself, heading rapidly for the door to the kitchen. Do they discuss _cases_ in _bed?_ he wonders, properly distracted at last as he locks the door and makes his way silently back to their spare room. It’s only once he’s settled in bed himself that he realises that he can hear them still. Not their words but the timbre and cadence and tone, coming through the shared wall between this room and theirs.

Robbie’s voice is a low rumble. It sounds from the pattern of their voices like he’s the one asking questions now. Almost in interview mode. James knows that particular tone from long years of familiarity, learning beside his guv’nor. _I don’t believe you but I’ll entertain your theories for now to see what information I can get from you._ Why he’s using that on Laura, James can’t even hazard a guess. Her tone is more measured, considered, persuasive.

And suddenly Robbie’s voice is in full indignant, _what in God’s name mode,_ gaining in volume, the way it does when he’s being faced with a theory that’s gathering evidence but he’s still refusing to take it on board.

Then there must be an intervention, unheard, from Laura because his voice suddenly drops again but continues on at a lower setting, undeterred. James feels a slight smile on his face, despite it all, and rolls over, finding his limbs growing reassuringly heavier, his body slowly stilling in the warm comfort of this bed, in this dark and quiet room, in their house with those voices murmuring away through a wall and almost next to him. It’s like the soothing background music he’d been craving.

It must be even more soothing than he realises. Because the next thing he knows sunlight is streaming through the curtains and he’s becoming aware that his head is as muzzy and his thoughts as slowed as if he’s far more hungover than that one glass last night could account for.

He stretches, taking in properly now those few but well-placed touches that make this room so welcoming. He’d only had a vague, unexamined impression of the calm comfort of it last night.

Although he also suspects that the comfort that he’d found almost waiting for him in this house had had little to do with the room.

There’s an enticing scent of something frying floating up from downstairs, suggesting he may well be the last one to surface. Probably time to get up.

When he makes his way down, Robbie is standing looking out one of the living-room windows, holding a mug that shows no signs of heat. “There you are,” he says, his face creasing into a smile when he registers James’s appearance. When he gestures James to precede him into the kitchen, Laura is in there, busy in front of the hob.

“Do you feel up to a full breakfast, James?”

And James remembers— _Laura usually does a fry-up on a Saturday._ Robbie, beside him at the window table of a café, on James’s first murder case. James had been a bit snippy that morning in response. “Trouble in paradise?” he’d enquired. He feels rather ashamed now, seeing Laura standing there, at the centre of this further snapshot of that happy domesticity that Robbie has finally regained after all his years alone. And the table in their kitchen set for three this morning.

He generally manages to be better than that about Robbie’s happiness with Laura.

It isn’t something he likes to recall, those early days as a newly-fledged inspector. And Robbie turning up, witnessing him struggle like that, giving no creed to James’s demeanour, but not quite letting up either, and just being so bloody typically Robbie that it had proved impossible not to yield to him as the case went on. Just as it’s been impossible not to fall back into step with him the last few months. Or to be so relieved deep down that he has. Because Robbie’s gruff, easy care may be sometimes almost painful, but it also continues to hit James as a welcome relief. And it’s certainly ever constant.

“Course he wants a proper breakfast,” Robbie says, easily, now.

Laura ignores that, focusing on James. “Don’t feel you have to have this. I can make you something else,” she offers.

But James, his original plan about stopping to eat somewhere off the motorway last night having gone by the wayside—which might partly explain why the whiskey had hit him so hard—is suddenly properly hungry and smiles at her instead.

He settles at the table, sunlight making its way gently through the window. It’s calm and bright this morning, but there are isolated flames of leaves scattered around the back lawn, attesting to James having slept through further storms that have blown clear now. They’ve done for the last of the trees’ cover for this season. From what he can see of that creeper that climbs across the pergola, it’s completely bared to the elements now.

But it’s warm in the kitchen and Robbie is settling opposite, although his gaze is landing and lingering unapologetically on James, in silence, just the way it had last night, come to think of it. As they’d sipped at the whiskey and Laura had taken most of the brunt of trying to make conversation with both of them. It’s the way that Robbie gazes at him when he’s trying to work something out about him.

He’s probably, understandably, wondering why James, a supposedly seasoned copper, had such trouble handling the aftermath of that accident last night.

“Did you sleep all right?” he asks suddenly.

“Yes,” James says, a habitual prevarication, as he comes to. “I didn’t mean to disrupt your whole evening like that,” he starts. A half-explanation.

“James,” Laura sets a plate down in front of him and looks straight at him in that slightly-disconcerting way she has. “We’re glad you did.”

He’s not really sure how to handle the honesty of her gaze in combination with her words, so he tries a smile back and focuses on one of the questions that has belatedly arisen as his head starts to clear a bit. “Whose pyjamas was I wearing?” They’d fitted James’s thin frame quite closely and been long enough in the leg to make him wonder too.

“Mark left them here,” Laura enlightens him. “It wasn’t worth the postage to send them to Australia.” Of course. James thinks that that's one of the nicest things Laura could possibly have done for Robbie, how she’d prompted him to change those vague _Be good to see you sometime_ gruff comments that James used to hear Robbie offer a few times over the years, at the close of one of Mark’s unexpected, infrequent calls, into an actual definite invitation to come back to Oxford for a fortnight in the summer. At least, from what James has worked out, that seems to have been how it had happened.

Robbie’s still giving him assessing glances. Maybe it’s more like there’s something new about James this morning that he’s trying to work out.

“I haven’t had a haircut since last week, you know.”

“Nothing there to cut,” Robbie says absently. “Be like trying to mow centre court at Wimbledon. Mid-tournament.”

Whatever he and Laura were debating last night, they seem happy enough this morning. Despite Robbie’s state of distraction, Laura seems perfectly at ease, sitting down beside Robbie now, looking amused as her gaze travels up to James’s shorn head.

And James can see why Robbie had been a bit morose about missing this weekly breakfast, he reflects with an inward grin. It is good. And it’s relaxing here. Worlds better than a café. He applies himself to eating for a while, enjoying the amiable silence.

It’s Robbie who eventually rouses himself, as he finishes his own breakfast, frowning over at James. “Where were you headed last night, anyway? You have the weekend off, don’t you?”

“A music festival.” And it suddenly hits James that—God. He really hadn’t been thinking straight at all last night. “I _have_ my overnight stuff—it’s in the car.” Laura had even handed him a toothbrush, still in its packet, besides what he’d been given to wear. Like they keep back-up supplies for unexpected guests landing in on them like this. And Robbie had given him his own shower stuff.

“James—” Robbie is trying to interject, but James is still taken aback by this evidence of his own lack of rational thought.

“Sorry, I mean, I _have_ sleepwear.”

“We don’t operate a dress code in this house—”

“But I needn’t have put you out—”

“James, _sod_ your pyjamas—”

“I’m sure they’re very nice pyjamas,” says Laura seriously, telegraphing a mock-reproving glare at Robbie before she turns back to James. “You’ll have to model them for us some other time, James. What he's trying to do, though, is ask you to dinner tomorrow. You’ll come back, won’t you?”

James, convinced he’s perfectly well recovered now, is not about to concern them further or break into their weekend any more than he already has. “Honestly, I’m fine,” he assures them both, earning himself an impatient grimace from Robbie. And he may as well be saving his breath as far as Laura is concerned.

“Glad to hear it,” she says, cheerfully. “And you’ll come back for dinner tomorrow? Unless you were thinking of heading to your festival?”

“No.”

“Oh, good. That’s sorted, then.”

Robbie meets James’s slightly helpless look with a shrug and a grin before rising, triggering James to start to get up himself to help clear. But he finds Robbie’s hand is on his arm and he’s shaking his head gently at James. “She cooks, I clear. Works the other way around, too.”

“Yes,” says Laura ruefully, “I somehow get the worse end of the deal there. There’s a lot more clearing to do after someone gets— _experimental_ —in a kitchen.”

Robbie, casting a look at her, starts to attend to a cafetiere that’s been emitting an aroma that’s making part of James’s mind focus purely on the welcome prospect of a decent, strong coffee. The cafetiere itself he’s suddenly surprised to recognise as an ulterior-motive gift he’d presented to Robbie back in his early sergeant days, along with his most guileless expression, when he really couldn’t face the thought of starting the day on one more cup of instant, after a night on Robbie’s couch. But it’s a long time since Robbie’s made him coffee in the morning. James had thought those days were over, that Robbie and Laura taking to inviting him over so easily to dinner as often as they do since he came back was the level that things were at now. Which is great, of course. But yet—here’s Robbie, this morning, automatically making one of the coffees to James’s exact preference, even as he continues to defend his cooking animatedly to Laura.

“There’s a difference between adventurous cooking and experimental,” he reminds her now, with dignity.

“Yes,” agrees Laura in relief. “And James and I are _very_ happy to hear you acknowledge that. At last.” James chuckles. “Come through and have your coffee in the living room, James.”

As he follows her through to the living room, James realises what he’d failed to take in when he came downstairs. The wooden-boxed digital radio that they often have on, tuned to a local station as soft background noise, is murmuring away on an end-table. Laura reaches for it, en route to the couch, and casually clicks it off. Then she sees he’s noticed. “They’re saying critical but stable now this morning, James,” she says gently. He nods. She drops down on the couch and gestures at him to sit beside her.

“It’s all your fault I thought it was a good idea to encourage him to cook, you know,” she says in accusing tones, pulling him back again from those images of last night.

“Mine?”

“The first time he cooked for me,” Laura elaborates. “That roast dinner. He called it his signature dish. I didn’t know then that by signature he meant something unique. As in sole. Not until he started to tackle other dishes. And then I find you’d secretly coached him through the roast. And _then_ you disappear off to Spain and leave him,” she says, shaking her head. “And leave _me_ to find out the hard way that he was only beginning his voyages of discovery…”

“He _is_ like Columbus,” James says gravely, balancing his cup with care, as he slouches down more comfortably. “Setting out to reach Asia, but discovering a whole new world. The way that he starts off creating something from one cuisine and then elements of others he’s recently discovered just—find their way in there instead.”

“Fusion cooking,” says Laura in surprised recognition.

“Yes. Except that tends to be more—planned.”

The noise of running water stops. “I can hear every word you’re sayin’,” comes an indignant call from the kitchen.

“Yes, love,” Laura calls back agreeably, making eyes at James over the rim of her cup and causing him to choke slightly on his own coffee. “But it’s my turn to cook tomorrow,” she reassures him. “You’d be quite safe.”

“I’ll bring—”

“You’ll bring yourself and nothing else. And—” She quirks her mouth, considering saying something more, he thinks. “Look—try and have an easy day of it, okay? Don’t head into the office and start catching up on case notes just because you didn’t get away for the weekend—”

The unanticipated weekend in Oxford suddenly stretches in front of James, a little empty, but, he pictures with pleasure, Sunday dinner back here at the end of it. And while it is generally tempting to head back into work for a few hours at the weekend just to tackle a few things in his never-ending workload, purely, he assures himself, to give them proper attention, there is also the thought that— “There is an exhibition at the Ashmolean that I’d meant to catch before it ended,” he realises, “So I might head home soon and go for a run first after I catch up on things around the flat.”

He gets a smile from her. “Some of us, on the other hand, have no choice today,” she says after a moment. “Will you drop me into work on your way? Robbie’s picking me up later.”

Half an hour later, as James follows her out to the hallway, goodbyes having been said, the memory of being firmly drawn in here last night, out of the miserable cold and the dark and straight into the warm, solid comfort of Robbie, rises up suddenly to meet him and he turns to find Robbie right behind him.

“I—thanks for—”

Robbie’s eyes are soft, his abstraction this morning dissipating, as his gaze meets James’s properly this time. “No. It’s like she said, lad. We’re right glad you thought to come to us.”


	2. Chapter 2

Laura’s running late. Now that Robbie is actually geared up to continue with this conversation, having been advised, of all things, to _sleep on it,_ by Laura, late last night, now that he’s spent a restless day with all sorts of confusing thoughts running through his mind and no real place to put them, it feels like she’s taking an age to appear. Even if the clock on the dashboard claims it’s been a mere few minutes.

He eyes her as she gets into the car. “Hello.”

“Hi.” And she seems perfectly calm. Much as she had been last night. Intent, and thoughtful, but calm. And now he’s had time to think, Robbie reckons he’s worked out why. None of this is new to her. She must have been thinking about this for a while—thinking that James has feelings for Robbie that go beyond friendship. Which means—well, one of the questions that Robbie is currently trying to avoid answering, even within the privacy of his own head, is that if, _if_ there’s truth in what she’s saying—how long is she saying this has been going on for James?

“Good day?” he asks.

“Fine. And did you have a pleasant Saturday, Robbie?”

“Laura…”

“Have you been giving any thought to what I said?”

“Christ, I’ve been doing nothing else. What did you think I’d do?”

“Well—I had hoped you’d popped down to Sainsburys too. We’re low on milk.”

Robbie’s not about to dignify with an answer. He’s gone back and forth that much today, he has his defences prepared by now too. “I still don’t think you’re right, I don’t reckon James feels that way about me—”

Laura’s eyes are quite kind as she studies him. “Do you really want to have this discussion in the car park of the Radcliffe? I mean, we can, but…”

“Are we going—” The original plan, once Laura had realised she’d have to spend most of today in work, had been to pick her up early in the evening and have a drink and a meal here in the city tonight.

“Let’s go somewhere we can talk, yes. But we could leave the car home and walk down to the pub?”

It’s not a bad idea, Robbie reflects, not too long afterwards, waiting at the bar to be served. One of the benefits of moving to their part of Oxford is their row of neighbourhood shops, buttressing this old pub that had long preceded them, and even including what looks likely to be a restaurant opening soon next door. For now, their local, which used to be a coachman’s inn, provides what Robbie considers is pretty decent fare, and they’ll probably eat here tonight. It’s still quiet enough that there’s merely a pleasant background hum of other folk’s conversations and he can see that Laura has secured a coveted wooden booth right beside the fire. A big old fireplace framed in with leather, brass-studded fenders and with the fire screened behind glass doors rather than the more open hearth of their fireplace at home.

But the light from the flames combines with the glass and brass lamps in the wall sconces to cast a warm glow on the exposed old brick of the walls and the polished wood of the tables. And over Laura, sitting there, gazing out the small bevelled window at the rainy darkness, just waiting for him.

The brightness, the warmth and the prospect of a pint as he carries their drinks over to her should be relaxing, but there’s too much on his mind now. And the prospect of continuing this conversation, of talking about James, properly talking about him, with Laura—it’s not a comfortable one.

“Good idea coming here,” he acknowledges, as he slides in to settle on the bench opposite her.

“Neither of us would want to drive. I’ve been looking forward to a decent glass of wine after a Saturday in work,” she says, commandeering her glass. “And—it didn’t seem fair that you couldn’t have something stronger for this conversation.”

Robbie stills, his hand, still wrapped around his pint resting on the table, suddenly cold as the chill of the glass seeps into it. “Are you sayin’ that this is that much of a problem—”

“ _Robbie._ No. Of course not. I just want us to talk about it. Okay? For once.” And her hand is over his, tugging it from the glass and taking it in her own, her steady grip, and the familiar feel of her smaller hand in his, returning warmth to him.

The relief of her reaction and her familiar direct comfort are enough to weaken his defences, making him ask the first unguarded question that comes into his head. “Why now?”

But that makes her sober, immediately, and her hand withdraws from his on the table. “Because I can’t take much more of it. Watching him.”

The uneasy, habitual, protest rises to Robbie’s lips. “He seems fine—”

But she cuts straight across this lip-service, this half-convincing reassurance that Robbie’s more accustomed to using on himself. “I’d be worried about him too if I were you.”

“You are?” he asks.

“Yes. He’s not okay, Robbie, not really. I mean—he’s fine, but he’s not okay.”

He lets his gaze leave hers and reaches for his glass again to take that first sip. Then he stops, propping his elbow on the table instead, steepling his fingers hard against his temple.

Laura is still looking at him. But she’s not quite as calm as she’s appeared to be up until now. There’s a flare of distress in her gaze too. And it’s in response to that that he can’t manage to hold back any further. Difficult though it is to face the thought that he’s hurt James. Laura is the one he’s always gone to, after all, over the years, at times when James has troubled him deep down, worried him beyond reason. And she’s stuck her oar in a couple of times too, unasked, when she’d been concerned. And there’s a sharp, sudden ache as something inside Robbie yields.

“He’s not in pain,” he says. It seems important to get that across, first. To make it clear.

Her mouth moves into a rueful grimace. “I know. He’s shut that down. He’s accepted it. He accepted it for years, intellectually. Maybe he never expected more from you. And now, after getting away, he accepts it on an emotional level too. God love him. But he isn’t over you, he hasn’t found someone else, he isn’t even open to that. And watching you with me—that must be a different reality altogether. But he’s learnt to live with it. He accepts it. He tries to be happy for you. He’d never do anything to rock the boat for you.”

Robbie scrubs his hand down his face, vaguely aware of her leaning forward, closing the distance between them across this table.

“Robbie. He troubles me. The same way he does you.”

Christ, putting it into proper words and thoughts only makes it worse. But her eyes are nothing but kind as he focuses on her again and if she’s offering him the release of voicing these nameless anxieties about James, talking to someone else who cares about him—

“I worry,” he starts.

“I know. I do too, if that helps. And I think that what he had with you is the most that he’s ever had.”

That tears at Robbie’s heart. “You don’t know that—”

“What you had was a lot. For you too. It did a lot for you. After you came back—”

“Aye.” Robbie knows. He knows what it was like coming back to an Oxford that had changed irrevocably and somehow finding, as time went on and the world started to right itself a bit at odd moments, that James was just there, increasingly. At his shoulder, ever-watchful. Across a pub table, becoming someone to share a pint with outside work and installing himself somehow as a regular feature. And then someone who—prickly sod though he could be at times—someone whose quick grin and gentle mocking it just became damn hard to imagine everyday life without. Until, after slipping quietly into Robbie’s life and heart like that, he’d removed himself from the job, and, worse, from Robbie, and gone off, leaving that restless recurring anxiety behind him.

Laura takes his hand again, lacing her fingers through his on the table top. Her grip is quite tight.

“And then—there’s the other side of the coin, Robbie. How you feel about him. He still responds to that, even if he reasons it away, he probably tells himself his feelings are one-sided now. But they’re not, are they? James—it’s not one-sided, Robbie.”

It’s such a sudden, unexpected ambush that he feels his bearing stiffen.

So it’s Laura who says the words for him, as she focuses on their entwined hands. “Loving me. It hasn’t stopped you loving James.”

Robbie says nothing at all.

“This is where you’d love to say ‘He’s my sergeant,’ wouldn’t you?” she suggests, pure ruefulness. Although she’s still not quite looking at him. “Such a handy catch-all so you could explain to yourself the bits you couldn’t qualify under friendship.”

He swallows, his throat dry, but he has no desire to reach for his pint. It seems important to stay quite still, to keep proper hold of her hand in his. “There is something about that relationship that you can’t understand if you’re not a copper,” he tells her rather hoarsely.

That makes her raise her head sharply. “Don’t you give me that—how many inspector-sergeant partnerships do you think I’ve watched in operation over the years? I watched you as a sergeant with Morse, I watched you become an inspector when you were still grieving for him and I saw you with your own sergeants—and then there was James. Don’t tell me it’s not different.”

“Laura,” he says carefully.

“You talked about him a lot more than you realised,” she says, her voice low. “While he was gone.”

Part of him, amid his shock and the need not to betray too much of a reaction, wonders suddenly what that had been like for her, noticing that. If he had. He must have if she’s saying it now. “I wasn’t sure he’d come back,” he admits.

“And you felt something was missing.” Her voice is quite neutral.

“Not with us,” he tells her quickly.

“Okay, not with us. But in your life, generally, that something was missing. And then he came back and you went straight back to work with him.”

“I missed the job.”

“Not just the job. You hesitated to go back because of how he’d feel and then you couldn’t say no once you thought he wanted you. You missed him.”

They’re not the words he’d use, the labels she puts on how he feels about James, how he’d felt when James upped and left like that. But nor are they words he can dispute. He shouldn’t have tried to explain to her exactly how that initial conversation with Innocent had changed into such a sudden return. To the job. But the job had got so tied up with James, over the last few years of it, it had become hard to see it separate. When he’d even thought of going back it had been impossible not to immediately picture James.

Laura has released his hand, maybe in response to his silence. It occurs to him that as hard as this conversation is for him, unfolding, weaving itself unnoticed amid what must surely be the more casual Saturday night chatter in this pub that has become their local, close to the home they’ve made for themselves together, while James was away—as hard as it may be for Robbie, it’s worse for her. But she wants to have it, is driving herself to ask him these questions, he recognises that, and what she’ll want is his honesty. And he can honestly reassure her that, above all, she is who he wants, since that must be where she’s going with this, and at least he is fully confident of that. So if she wants to talk about James, maybe, all things considered and his own traitorous feelings included, he just owes her that.

“So you were having trouble adjusting to being retired,” she says, the hand that had been holding his now having retreated to hold her glass, on the table between them. “Once we’d got the house sorted. But if it was just that, I’d like to think you’d have talked to me first.”

“There wasn’t much time to,” he tells her, gently.

“Because James needed you. Had asked for you, you thought.”

“Aye. Well, that’s what Innocent said.” Or had heavily implied, in retrospect, once Robbie had replayed that conversation later with the benefit of hindsight. It had seemed sort of fitting, though—he’d first landed up with James when the two of them had almost stumbled into a case together. When things could have gone down a different road for Robbie. And James had asked for Robbie at the end of it. And then there he was, being pulled back in in sudden fashion, on James’s own first murder case, when he’d asked for Robbie back again—or so Innocent had let Robbie think.

“God, you’ve got to hand it to Jean. She knew how to reel you back in. You know she did, Robbie, she had the measure of you. She knew he needed you and not specifically for your expertise. James was her trump card, getting you back on her force. And she knew you’d stop him punishing himself. Free him up to do the job the way she knew he could. She’s watched you both for years.”

As has Laura. The truth of that disconcerts him enough that he stays silent. His pint is sitting largely abandoned, and he finds he has little desire to drink it beyond raising the glass the odd time for something to do at moments when Laura’s gaze becomes uncomfortable to face.

“You couldn’t resist James wanting you, Robbie. And if it had been about missing the job, you wouldn’t have categorically failed to talk to me before deciding. You weren’t about to risk getting my input and having to take that into account. And a large part of you wanted to avoid having this conversation with me.”

“You mean the one we’re having now?” Robbie tries an appeasing grimace at her. “That didn’t work out too well for me, then, did it?” He means only to try and break the tension, but she just looks back at him, impatient. “We’re just—partners again,” he acknowledges. But the prospect of getting that back, all that that was unacknowledged shorthand for, once James would actually let him back in, had been—well, as it had turned out, not something he’d been able to refuse. Maybe, when it comes right down to it, what Robbie has easily subsumed, comfortably uninterrogated, under the convenient headings of _We’re partners_ and _He’s my sergeant_ and _Hathaway_ for years isn’t too different from how Laura claims he feels about James. Once those labels had been lost, and even James’s mere presence could no longer be taken for granted, it had become harder to deny that what was there escaped other attempts to easily define it.

“Don’t I know it,” Laura says ruefully. “And before I know it, you could be falling slowly back into it.”

“Into what?”

“All that easy touch and lack of boundaries between the two of you. I’ve seen you both, right through the years, Robbie, so don’t even try and deny it.”

“You’re the one who finds him dishy,” Robbie hedges, trying to find a lighthearted note here that’s eluding him. Because, Christ, they’re not actually going to talk about—but Laura just sits and looks at him.

“You do,” he tells her.

She still says nothing for a long moment while she gazes at him, no levity in her expression at all. “Picture it,” she says at last.

And despite not having given her any real denial, his prevarications suddenly seem so pointless that he can feel the heat of being caught out in a lie.

He’s never been asked about this before, never had to justify in stark words a feeling that had felt too natural to be wrong, as long as he’d avoided giving it too much thought. His pleasure in James’s close physical presence a harmless self-deception that, God knows, James would never challenge him on, would never expect Robbie to follow through on. Except—maybe that part of James that he doesn’t keep so well-suppressed under long-term resignation had noticed and had hoped. The guilt that accosts Robbie at that thought and Laura’s waiting gaze, as she sits ready, for some reason he can’t quite fathom, to offer him understanding if he can admit to this—and ready to say God knows what if he doesn’t—it all pulls at him, despairingly.

He slides further in along the bench and raises his eyebrows across at her, almost a plea. He hopes she'll understand he wants her beside him now not just to help him get this out but to let her know that, despite it all, what he feels for her is not in any doubt. To his relief, she gets up and slides in next to him. She doesn’t lean back, she has one elbow propped on the table now, looking at him much as she had last night. So he leaves his arm along the back of the bench. An invitation, if she wants it.

She looks at his beer. “You’re not enjoying that,” she says, in neutral tones. “D’you want something stronger?” He shakes his head briefly. He just doesn’t want her to go anywhere.

“Sometimes it’d make me feel—” he says, with difficulty. And then he tries that sentence another way to see if he can get it out any better. “I’d realise after we’d been sitting—like that—”

The warm comfort of James sitting against him. And not just comfort but something more—a bit of a boost, a frisson, piquing a stir of curiosity inside Robbie at odd moments when James used to lean over him, close, at Robbie’s computer, hand on Robbie’s arm for balance. Or his touch on Robbie’s arm or shoulder landing firmly and lingering, to halt Robbie, to hold him still, while James scrolled the thumb of the other hand down the screen of his phone, alerted to an email or text arriving.

“You felt attracted to him,” Laura fills in, matter-of-factly. He can’t begin to work out why she’s being so kind about this.

“But we don’t—not any more, not since you and I—” he tries reassuring her.

“And the fact that there _was_ something to stop doing, behaviour that you both needed to hold back from when you entered a proper relationship with someone else—doesn’t that tell you what was there?”

“He’s just—James—” And Robbie runs helplessly aground, unable to either deny or acknowledge these half-formed truths that he doesn’t let coalesce into irrevocable words but which she’s slowly, inexorably, shining light on. “Laura, I swear I’d never—”

“I know,” she says softly. She does seem to implicitly believe him. It feels rather more than he deserves.

“And I never meant to make him think—” he says rather desperately.

“I know,” she repeats. “And James will know that too. So he’s backed off, out of respect for our relationship and for you. And for me. Backed off all the way to Spain at first. And now he’s back again. And as it turns out—” But she seems to be struggling now. “I don’t _want_ him to back off and put up those boundaries. Around himself. I don’t like seeing him go even more in that direction. He spent all that time in solitude and came back even more entrenched in his self-sufficiency. Convinced of it and willing to trust no-one again. And with something to prove, heaven help his first sergeant. And then poor Lizzie. Trying to make a dent in that.”

“She managed okay in the end,” Robbie says, distracted.

“Not until you came back and started to gently insinuate yourself back under his shell. You made cracks in his defences for her to slip into. And then last night he let me in too. He’s let you in before. You. But not us. And now he has. And he yearns for something like this, Robbie, to be included. I don’t know if he ever quite knows what he’s looking for but whatever it is, he comes closer to finding it in you than anywhere else. “

There’s a swell of hopeless frustration in him at that, an utterly unfair, ridiculous impulse to say that she should have had this conversation with him years ago. Because however much she’s focusing on recent events with James that have finally made her speak, now that he’s facing up to this, Robbie knows that none of this, none of what she’s saying about what lies between him and James is new. It’s just that it’s now become Laura’s business. But it feels utterly hopeless to be driven to acknowledge it at last, in this situation. “But why are you—I can’t _give_ him that now.”

“ _You_ can’t, no. But we can.”

“What?”

She’s leaning toward him, right beside him. “What if you didn’t have to choose? Keep pushing back what you feel for him. What if you don’t have to stop loving him? You could love him. Properly. The way you want him to be loved. And you can be the one to give him that. But not by yourself. Both of us.”

“You can’t mean—”

She sits back, her gaze assessing now and picks up her glass briefly to take a sip. “Can’t I? Why can’t I?” she asks, setting it back down carefully without taking her eyes off him.

“You want to—” Robbie can’t even locate the words.

“Yes.”

“And you’d be willing to do that for him—for me—” He can’t make sense of that.

It’s completely the wrong thing to say.

Apparently with Laura he can admit to having unruly feelings about James that run deeper than they should and, even if she finds that difficult to finally hear on some level, she also seems relieved that it’s just out in the open, fully acknowledged in Robbie’s mind at last and recognised between them. But accuse her of sacrificing herself in some way—God only knows why she sees that as an accusation, but she does. And he should’ve known better than to even think that that would be it.

“I’m not being _kind._ He’s _there,_ Robbie. Whether he’s actually here, and you’re worrying about him, or he’s drawing away and you’re worrying yourself all the more and trying to suppress it—he’s always there. Or,” she adds, raising her eyebrows sharply at him, “you’re prioritising his needs and reclaiming your partnership with him over our partnership. He’s always going to be there, for you. And this might be a way to face up to that and _do_ something about it. For all three of us.”

He stares at her. “How did the idea of this even get into your head? As some way to address things?”

“Not just—you’re not listening to me properly.”

“It’s a hell of a lot to take in,” Robbie protests.

“Robbie, it’s causing me pain watching him now. And the closer we get to him, as he starts to find a way to fit back into your life now that he’s accepted that you’re with me—the more his pain is going to hurt me.”

He watches her, startled. She’s utterly intent. “The initial idea did come from being uncomfortable watching you watching him, yes. After we got together, it wasn’t endearing to watch the two of you together any more. Not the way it used to be. But—I wasn’t happy to see you pulling back from each other either, it didn’t feel _right._ It _should_ have, when we were in the early days of our relationship. But it didn’t. And I certainly wasn’t happy that he left, so abruptly and cutting all his ties like that. I was relieved when he came back and came back to the job. But then—it feels like a bit of a struggle between James and me now at times. Much as he tries to hold back.”

Sometimes, when Laura suddenly decides to give him her opinion on something, the level of forthrightness she offers—and expects back from him—still makes him slightly breathless. She seems to misread the source of his stymied expression, though.

“You set this up, originally, Robbie Lewis. Years ago. You’ve only got yourself to blame now, if we all need a less conventional solution,” she informs him.

“What on earth did _I_ do?” He sincerely can’t think of how he’s given her any cause to think of this idea. Not when the notion hadn’t entered his head until she’s gone and put it there now.

But she’s eyeing him, in a way that tells him she’s got something else she wants to say. He gives her a short nod, waiting. She locks her eyes on his. Laura always does that. Looks straight at you, relentlessly, whenever she’s actually having more difficulty telling you something. And yet it still takes him aback when she turns her attention onto their shared history.

“I didn’t know if you’d ever be ready, Robbie. For what we have now. I wanted to move on from you and the halfway stage we were at over the years and I couldn’t do it properly. In an emotional sense, I mean. I certainly tried to. It was hard. Maybe because we didn’t want to lose the friendship. But you also—you did hold onto me—you never strung me along but you held on and you’re hard to let go of, even when I didn’t know if anything more would ever become of what was there between us. And that halfway territory that we inhabited for years—it wasn’t unlike what you’ve had going on with James. So we were rather in the same boat, he and I.”

“That wasn’t intentional,” he says gruffly.

Her eyes are soft with compassion. “I know. You were grieving and you couldn’t—but you’re the one who _has_ kept the boundaries of this relationship between us permeable for years. While James found his way further into your heart. You're the one who had me take notice and become so fond of him—well—it was him too, in fairness, by virtue of being himself. But I’m used to sharing you in some ways with James already. It’s no wonder it feels so wrong to leave him out now. And why he was hit quite so hard when we finally took the step that did suddenly push him aside.”

“Laura—”

“It was sudden, Robbie, it took me by surprise. There’s no way he could have seen it coming.”

“—he did _not_ get pushed aside.”

“Okay, then, he withdrew before he could be pushed. Fairly adept at warding off blows in advance, isn’t he?”

Robbie wishes he was. Having it brought home to him, again and again now, what James must have felt like around the time that he hit crisis point and left. And then throughout his long, isolated walk and further, when he came back and got into that bloody awful unapproachable state—it feels like one guilt-inducing blow after another. The thought that Robbie’s own unease about seeing any of this could have created this situation for James. And also created it for Laura, who, in her own upset over this, has faced up to how things actually are better than Robbie has. And now she’s the one proposing an idea that some small part of him is beginning to fasten onto with the welcome hope of relief.

“Robbie?”

“I’m listening,” he tells her.

“Then when he came to us last night. _I_ felt a pull to comfort him—not for you to do it, me, and I realised—I can’t just let him go on like this. You were right to doubt he would come back. It’s more of a surprise that he actually did. And I couldn’t just let him go off again, falling through the cracks like he nearly did before. Not now that he’s started to let me back in too. I want to be free to step in now.”

“So you really think we could?” he checks.

She nods, her expression falling into relief. Because he’s finally looking at the situation as it stands and because he’s properly thinking about this, he reckons.

“I’m prepared to offer him more and see what actually happens between the three of us,” she says. “Play it out, what’s already there and see where it leads us.”

“And you think that where it would lead to, if we did that, is including him properly in—everything?”

She looks at him and a slow smile starts to lift the corners of her mouth. “To including him properly in everything,” she says gravely. “Yes, Robbie.”

He narrows his eyes at her. “Given this bit much thought, have you?” he asks.

“Oh, _yes_ ,” she says, fervent.

She had drawn his attention to James repeatedly over the years. He’d sort of assumed that was a joke. "Have you been more attracted to him than I thought?” he asks, aiming for a neutral enquiry.

“James?” she asks, matter-of-fact. “I think he’s gorgeous.”

“Did you ever let him know that?”

“Of course not. He wouldn’t even have let his mind go there. Far too loyal to you.” That’s certainly true. “And what about you, Robbie?” Laura wonders aloud, politely, picking up her glass and tilting her head to examine the play of light in the depths of the remaining wine. As if she’s ruddy well enquiring after his health.

And it seems beyond churlish to admit this now, but the least he owes her is his belated honesty. “I’m not sure I actually can. With a bloke, like.”

She doesn’t seem to see that as much of a problem, oddly. She sets the glass back down and just looks at him. “So don’t think of him as a bloke. Think of him as James. And give that thought a bit of time to settle.”

Robbie grimaces, trying this on. It still feels too—exposing—to let himself think of James in that way, instead of pushing back any such thoughts. While he’s still trying to wrap his head around this. Wrap his head around the fact that Laura is actually encouraging him to think of James like that, that this aspect of it makes her—well, she’s looking at him with distinct interest as his face starts to heat. And it turns out she’s watched him and James for years and thought—well, thank Christ it’s just that she’s a shrewd observer and knows both of them too bloody well, so at least no-one else would have noticed Robbie and his sergeant, like that.

“Although—I _definitely_ reserve the right to think of him as a bloke,” she qualifies.

Bloody hell. That’s another aspect to it. James and Laura? Both of them together and Robbie—watching them? He abruptly gets a taste of why Laura’s interest seems to quicken when she talks about him and James. Watching Laura and James? Or participating as they both—It seems almost too good to be true—that he could explore that, could have both of them like that, untrammelled by guilt—

Laura certainly seems to be picking up that the thought of this has weakened him to her purpose. She seems to be keeping a straight face with an effort when his attention returns properly to the here and now.

She takes one long sip of her wine and obviously decides to strike while the iron is hot for a last push. She is bloody persuasive, he has to give her that. “So why not, Robbie? Why shouldn’t we? Give me a good reason against it. Social convention? An exclusive partnership of two people—it is just a social construct. It’s simply the most prevalent model in our culture. Nothing says we have to be bound by it.”

“Well, now you’re just sounding like him.”

She glares at him briefly and then gives in. “Okay. Look, I know it’s not for everyone. But I think it’ll suit us. I think that you and I have something good going here…” She looks at him questioningly.

He nods at her. He doesn’t know whether it’s all those years of friendship with her that had made slipping into a relationship somehow so easy in the end, or if that had just given him and Laura a good solid foundation of honesty with each other to start off with. But he does agree.

“And I don’t think it would weaken anything, sharing that properly with James. Going back to the way that we were already sort of balanced before. I think finding ways to be more generous with each other can strengthen our relationship. That’d suit you down to the ground. And—” She shrugs, rather helplessly. “Robbie. At the end of the day—it’s James.”

_It’s James._

He thinks about how he’d lost James as his sergeant in the end, how he hadn’t managed to keep him going, had failed to get him past his struggles over Adam Tibbit’s death as he’d managed to get James past moments of wavering and doubt in himself over the years. But Robbie had been constrained or distracted somehow by being with Laura—and by that also meaning he was starting to make plans that took him away from his partnership with James. And that had let James fall in the end without the safety net that it turned out Robbie had provided.

And now Laura seems to be saying that he can not only still reach for James instead, that there’s no longer any conflict between being the way he has been with James over the years and his relationship with her, but that he can actually—

“Deep down he’ll want to, Robbie. He wants us. He may not have worked out what the shape of it is that we’ll offer him, but he wants to be included in this. He loves you.”

The last objection, but probably the worst sticking point is wrenched out of him reluctantly, in face of that. “But he might not agree to this.”

“Well—no. He wouldn’t. Yet,” says Laura. Investing the last word with a wealth of meaning that makes him look warily at her.

“He’s a stubborn sod, you know,” he tells her. Laura shrugs, unperturbed. “You don’t know just _how_ stubborn he is,” Robbie warns.

“Well,” she murmurs. “Not the only one, is he?”

Robbie gives her a suspicious look.

She raises her eyebrows back at him. “I don’t back down easily,” she informs him. “In case you’d failed to notice. And—oh, what? Are you trying to pretend with that accusing look that you’re a pliable type? Okay, Robbie. Stubbornness would be an _entirely_ new proposition for me to deal with in a man. Unchartered territory. I’m entirely unfamiliar—”

“All right,” he tells her. Now she’s vying with James in the sarcasm stakes, too. She’s not getting it, though, the risks of this, when it comes to James. “I’m not springing it on him. Not letting him think we feel sorry for him or like he can’t cope. Not after last night.” James would be completely bloody furious if he picked up on any hint of sympathy about this, Robbie realises, with a sudden deeper qualm, recognising just how badly James could react. “I’m not risking pushing him away again,” he clarifies brusquely.

Laura seems to understand something more from that than what he’s said.

“All right, Robbie.” Her tone is kind. “We won’t spring it on him just yet. Take it slow. See if he wants what we have to offer, see how he responds. Even if he just lets us in a bit more, if he lets himself be taken care of a bit—wouldn’t hurt, would it?” She’s looking at him, her eyes soft.

Robbie gets a picture of James, last night, in that state of shock, the same memory that’s been troubling at him throughout his long day of solitary thought. Because it isn’t new. The look of him last night had reminded Robbie of the lost look he’d seen on James’s face as his sergeant, over the years, at times when things had gone quite wrong—but now there’s also the memory of James with his guard down, his head finding a place on Robbie’s shoulder, briefly letting himself seek something from Robbie, pushed to that point by his pain. Just as he’d automatically come back to seek Robbie with his sergeant-era knock at their door. And now there’s also a memory of the way that James’s gaze had been drawn to Laura by her hand pressed against his back. And then one of her sitting murmuring to James on their couch as his eyes had searched hers for comfort.

And if what Laura is saying is that it really is all right for them both to respond to that glimpse of James’s longing that he’d unintentionally let them see, that they can just see what happens, as she’d put it—well, the part of Robbie that has always, logic or reason bedamned, just cleaved to James, that part can’t hold back from what Laura is suggesting.

It really couldn’t hurt.

“We can see if he’ll let me in that bit more, too,” Laura is saying. “He already is, you know.”

“What d’you mean?”

“That first murder case he had. Shortly before you materialised out of nowhere. He was so tightly-wound.” Bloody hell, she’s not wrong there. “So when he appeared at the first crime scene, I just demanded to see his new warrant card and then kissed him. He was dead pleased, actually. Despite himself.” Laura’s face is alight, remembering. Maybe Robbie would’ve made headway quicker with the James who had awaited him that first day if that’s what he’d done too.

He shakes his head at Laura now. “Over the corpse of—well, I’m glad to see you’re continuing your own tradition of flirting with CID inspectors over dead bodies.”

“Yes,” she agrees, taking a last sip to finish her wine. And then suddenly she’s smiling at him properly, her eyes clear and meeting his, her whole bearing lighter in a way that makes him wonder just how long she’s been holding back. It gives him a pang to think that she could have felt this way, watching his held-down feelings for James for this long and waiting for some change to come before she’d finally just decided to take matters into her own hands like this. _Loving me hasn’t stopped you loving James._ But her relief meets and matches with his own now and finding that, incredibly, they can be on the same page about this—he finds his arm sliding down around her shoulders, at last, drawing her a little closer with a sigh. She looks up at him.

“There’s still James to reckon with, though,” he tells her, giving in to the impulse to kiss her briefly and settle her more firmly against his side.

“Maybe,” she muses; her face moving into a thoughtful expression. Robbie knows that look.

Oh, Christ. On some level this is also starting to appeal to her as a bit of a challenge.


	3. Chapter 3

Things have been different since that night of the accident, a fortnight ago now. James has found himself over here more often, like this, slouching down comfortably in this chair that seems almost made for the length of his frame, balancing another glass of wine after dinner. He might as well, as Robbie had said with a shrug. Just stay over. They really don’t seem to mind.

Often, now, on days when Robbie is in the station, he’ll stick his head round the doorframe of James’s office and gently subject him to such casual, teasing persuasion that it gets hard to refuse him without sounding stiff or churlish. Robbie’s always had a way of simply bypassing the worst of James’s resistance, when he sees no need for it.

“Come on,” he’d said earlier this evening. “That’ll all keep till tomorrow. Laura said that if you politely refused I was to check that you knew it’s her night to cook, not mine. Told her that’d make no difference, but—”

“It does,” James had assured him, and had received an eye-roll and an instruction to be at theirs within the hour, then.

Oddly, given how careful Robbie is to act in accordance with their more equal status in work matters, he does still issue instructions when it comes to his ideas on James’s off-duty welfare. Much as he used to in James’s sergeant days, when he’d unashamedly frown across at James, assessing something about him in displeased fashion after a rough day. And then make a pint sound like more of an order than a suggestion. And damned if James would ever admit it, but there are times when he finds a certain relief in that harkening back to the days when he’d been Robbie’s to instruct.

“Oh, they came,” Laura says, pleased. James turns his focus back to the present moment and over to the couch and sees that they’re going through their post and she’s shaking out the contents of a large envelope. “The tickets. And there’s even a brochure.”

“Great,” mutters Robbie.

“A modern adaptation of ‘Great Expectations’ for the stage,” Laura tells James. “It’s a prequel to this year’s Literature Festival.”

“Oh,” says James, interested. “I read about that interpretation—”

Robbie, his expression lifting as befits a man who’s being granted a last-minute reprieve, plucks one ticket from Laura’s hand and rises to give it to James. “There you go, lad,” he says, magnanimously, settling back on the couch.

Laura rolls her eyes at him. “Don’t make out it’s a _gift_ you’re generously bestowing on him,” she says. “But James, if you’re free…” She looks suddenly alert as she studies him over the rim of her glass.

“But don’t you both want—” But there’s obviously no point asking Robbie if he _wants_ to go to this. And the idea of going to it with someone who’d enjoy discussing it, as Laura would—it’s suddenly hard to resist.

“You can be me proxy,” Robbie says, pleased with himself. “And—” He stops, his glance trailing surreptitiously to the brochure now lying on the coffee table. “And this has potential,” he muses.

Laura’s gaze follows his. “No, you don’t. James, cast your eye over what’s listed in there and I’ll book three tickets for anything that takes your fancy. _Three_ tickets, Robbie.”

“An’ how come I don’t just get to choose what _I’m_ interested in?” enquires Robbie.

“Because you grumble at the pretentious titles and choose nothing, but then quite enjoy yourself most of the time when you’re dragged along.”

There’s a pause while Robbie seems to find this difficult to dispute. “Half the time,” he clarifies.

“Most of the time. It’s just that you’ll only admit it half the time.” She reaches for the invitingly thick brochure and tosses it, frisbee-like, across to James, who catches it automatically. “Here you are. You can sit in the middle. Save me from being the target of long-suffering looks if someone onstage breaks into a monologue. He doesn’t appreciate those.”

“Had too many of ‘em over the years,” Robbie informs James. “On all sorts. From you as me sergeant. Can’t even tell them on stage to give it a rest. And—hold on a minute. Isn’t stuff chosen by you going to be even worse than stuff chosen by Laura?”

James, quite unable to hide the ridiculous extent of his pleasure about Laura’s sudden matter-of-fact inclusion of him in this, never mind at the prospect of sharing with both of them some of the further joys that he knows will be contained in this year’s brochure, unleashes some of the delight rising up in him in a full-blown smirk at Robbie.

Possibly Robbie sees through that attempt at provocation to what lies beneath it, though, because James just gets a sudden soft smile right back at him.

 

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Laura, one hour of unwinding and one glass of wine ahead of them, is only half-watching the early evening news. As they arrive, she can hear them bickering about something that they’ll probably start rehashing if she’s moved to enquire. But between the glass in her hand, the cat curled on her lap, the warmth of the fire and the comfortable knowledge that they’ve managed to time their arrival fairly perfectly for the dinner which is sending out an inviting aroma from the oven now, she’s entirely too relaxed to bother.

James, starting to greet her, takes pause, his surprised gaze going to the anomaly in the room. “Did I miss a month?” he enquires.

“Jack,” she enlightens him, aiming for a resigned tone. “He was staying this weekend and he was upset to realise he wasn’t going to see Robbie over Christmas. Apparently he hadn’t taken in that we’re not _all_ just decamping to his other grandparents’ house. He’d just assumed everybody would be there. So Mr Indulgent Grandpa here—”

“You enjoyed yourself decorating it too,” Robbie puts in.

“—decides we’ll all go and select a new one together.”

“Oh, it looked real—no, of course not. It wouldn’t last. But very realistic,” he compliments them gravely, looking at the rather gaudy, haphazard tree that certainly bears testament to Jack’s input. “A classic choice for mid-November home décor.”

She could be wrong about the tinge of disappointment that had seeped through there at first, belying his casual words. She could be.

But Robbie, who can read a tone from James as if he’s been naturally tuned into a frequency for years that only he can hear, says easily. “We’ll be getting a real one, too.” Which comes as news to her. “And you’ll be helping me with that, come closer to the time.”

She studies James, who’s now looking rather pleased but suppressing his pleasure, just as she’d watched him attempt to do that first time she’d finally seen him after his promotion and demanded to see his warrant card.

So she had read that right. Watching Robbie watch James is almost like having an interpreter. It’s hard to tell why a real tree might matter quite so much, but that’s not the point. The part that makes her give a brief squeeze to Robbie’s forearm in understanding now, as he stoops to kiss her, is that it matters to James that there’s a real one here, that here is where he wants it. Not that James will admit to that. He’s already covering his reaction with affecting a long-suffering look at Robbie. He probably wouldn’t admit to himself that something like that could matter to him.

“I’m lined up to help?” he calls after Robbie as Robbie disappears into the kitchen. James is still standing in front of the tree, peering at various ornaments as if they’re exhibits from a crime scene. “Why?” he enquires as Robbie returns and hands him a glass of wine. “Are we going deep into the forest and bearing one home? I don’t think they let you do that now, whatever they did in your younger days—”

Sometimes she’d swear she can hear an inaudible _sir_ now, that he suppresses at the end of a snarky remark like that to Robbie. She smiles over at him. “I’ve always had a certain fondness for lumberjacks, James. Robbie even has the shirts for it, don’t you? We’ll have to see about kitting you out properly, too.”

“Yes. Or we could just go and select a tree from the garden centre,” says Robbie, in the long-suffering tone he adopts whenever Laura joins James in teasing him. And he sets his own glass down on the coffee table and settles down beside her. On the wrong side of her, oddly. He’s in a better position to watch James examining the tree still, maybe that’s why.

It’s been quite comforting watching Robbie recently when his glances rest on James, his face softening as he looks at him. There’s less of that anxiety there that used to trouble her. It’s certainly easier for her, not looking up to find his gaze dwelling on James in restless fashion.

And it’s an undoubted relief to have had it out and find they are slowly coming onto the same page here, that the strength of that pull Robbie’s had towards James for so long is not something that will come between them. That it is, if only James can somehow be gently, properly reached under all that entrenched self-preservation, something that brings them together instead. Something that will bring relief to her, as that pain James seems to carry, that troubles her so, the closer that she gets, hopefully starts to find a little surcease. And something that makes this whole relationship with Robbie—which God knows has never followed a normal course over the years, and his quietly ever-present, watchful sergeant certainly had something to do with that too—somehow all the richer again for simply including him properly where he’s already to be found.

It seems such a simple, unlikely and yet fulfilling solution. Yet there’s something more natural than she would have thought possible in the actual unfolding of it, at moments like this.

Although—there’s also just as much sheer exasperation as ever directed at James from Robbie. Laura shifts back a little more, her arm crooked up on the top of the couch, enjoying this.

“And you’ll need me for this festive enterprise because…” James checks.

“Save me back,” Robbie says, nodding.

“Save us the need to get out a step-ladder when we put the star on top,” she adds.

James, finally finishing his examination of the overly-early Christmas scene, turns, treating them both to his best sceptical eyebrow-raise. And then he catches sight of the three presents, wrapped laboriously by very small fingers and with more sellotape than skill, that are laid out on the seat of the armchair, beside the tree. One for Robbie, one for her and one for Monty, apparently. Christmas shopping in November. It had certainly been an interesting weekend, finding herself drawn ever more into Robbie’s ideas of what constituted activities for his grandson.

But she knows that Jack had carefully laid the results of all his efforts under the tree. He’d wriggled right in there on his back like some sort of mini-commando to arrange them and, catching her watching him, grinned up at her in sudden delight through the gently-lit lower branches. This grandparenting-by-default experience—it certainly has its moments of surprising pleasure.

“I thought that was my seat,” James grumbles. Oh.

Robbie, right beside her, examines his post.

“It is if you want, James,” she assures him. “Always there, okay? But you can sit over here if you like, too. With us.”

He shifts a little restlessly over the next few minutes, while she watches him from the corner of her eye, affecting to give her full attention to the end of the news. But then he seems to find a comfortable position—goodness, he does slouch. He’s landed up with his head nearly level with hers when she sits with her feet tucked up like this, and he can still cross those long legs so they sprawl outwards past the coffee table, in a way that makes one of those firm thighs flex briefly against the material of his suit trousers.

She suddenly recalls that he’d been part of a crew that had won the boat race.

He’s balancing the bowl of his wine glass on the pads of those long fingers while he’s at it, turning the glass in his hand so that the cuff of his shirt-sleeve rides up, exposing a fine-boned wrist. His fingers really are long. And supple. And quite adept on the guitar, she’s heard from Robbie, too.

Judging by the way that he stills all his nervous movement at last, and eventually gives a soft sigh right beside her, he’s decided that he’s okay with this new seating arrangement. She settles back, her knees brushing against that firm upper thigh as she repositions herself. James gives her an absent-minded smile.

Robbie, apparently still absorbed in their fairly mundane post, gives a sudden smile at the letter in his hand, in response.

 

============================================================

 

James clicks open his seatbelt and reaches over to release the door handle, a rather unnecessary gesture, it belatedly occurs to him, since Laura still has to pull the door into an open position. But she’s tilting her head at him, and “Hello,” she says sounding curious and pleased, both, and he feels less ridiculous as he straightens up again.

“His meeting with Innocent got delayed,” he tells her. “So he was called into it just as he got your text that you were ready to be picked up.”

“And here was you thinking your days of Robbie dispatching you on random duties were over,” she says, shaking her head as she fastens her seatbelt beside him.

“I’m not on duty,” he objects. “He said you’d had a long night, so of course I would. You shouldn’t be stuck waiting when I’m here—”

“It was a long day. I got called out in the early hours and Robbie insisted on getting up and dropped me in. He knew we’d have our staff meeting this evening and said I’d be exhausted by the time I got to the end of the day and wouldn’t want to be driving home so he could just pick me up. Plus the conditions were quite bad at that early hour and he gets a bit—you know how he is. This time of year—it doesn’t help much.”

James sends a quick glance at her, before checking his mirror to pull out. Because of course Robbie would sometimes still be taken by a fairly irrational anxiety around this. It is nearly December now, with all that will always hold for Robbie. And Laura, who would have let anyone else know in no uncertain terms that she’d been handling her own unpredictable schedule and more punishing hours than this for many years—and would certainly have no more trouble driving in bad conditions than Robbie would—Laura had been gentle with Robbie in his grief for so many of those years too that she’d find a way to accommodate his need to do this for her. To let him feel a bit more in control if anxiety rises up for him around this.

She does look exhausted, though. He’s glad he’s left the office early enough for once so that they don’t have to contend with the delay of rush hour traffic. He has her home in fairly short order, pulling into the driveway to let her out as there’s no sign of Robbie’s car yet.

“Hope you get a good night’s sleep—” he starts.

But she’s frowning at him. “And where are you going?” she asks.

“You’re worn out, you’ll want to rest—”

“Any reason why you can’t come in?”

He shouldn’t this time, though. He really shouldn’t indulge himself in another evening here. Not when she’ll want to unwind. But it’s tempting, and a thought strikes him that could legitimise his presence—“I could make a start on dinner,” he offers. “While you relax.”

Laura looks at him like she doesn’t quite know what to do with him. “But you don’t have to—” She sounds almost exasperated. Then she stops. “Okay, James,” she says, more gently. “You can cook. Let’s go in, though. Before we freeze.”

“Oh. Sorry.” He turns off the engine. He should have turned the heater up. He’s used to having it at a higher default setting for the winter. But he’s warmer this year. Winter is somehow not seeping into him yet, carving that deep-seated chill into his bones that it has in previous years, making him develop the habit of hunching into his coat. It’s not putting that ache or desolate feel into him.

Lizzie says there’s no way it’s warmer than usual. The first time he’d casually made the observation, she’d looked at him with her incredulous _I’d be objecting to this in far stronger terms if you weren’t my boss_ look.

Then she’d muttered something under her breath about how he wouldn’t think so if his inspector had wanted to smoke, forcing them to have coffee breaks sitting outside perfectly warm cafes on freezing metal chairs meant for midsummer, in the bleak midwinter.

Her ability to detract from the cheek of her comments by delivering them at just a low enough volume, in a quick enough mutter or in a tone of respect so that you can’t _quite_ be sure she means what she’s just said—it’s developing by the day, really. When he’d mildly remarked upon that duality one evening, Robbie had developed a coughing fit and Laura had said wasn’t it good to see her continuing the illustrious tradition of irreverent sergeants keeping their inspectors in place? Maybe he should give Lizzie decent gloves for Christmas for those al fresco coffees. He could ask Laura what to get.

And then there’s Christmas, that’s another difference. He hasn’t yet found himself feeling that slightly lofty superiority over his fellow-man’s engaging in the rampant commercialism of it all. Nor his own sense of disengagement. Not that he isn’t dreading the nick’s Christmas party. But it seems like he doesn’t have to erect metal barriers against Christmas, to mentally resist it this year. He can let it play out like some festival almost belonging to another culture. It doesn’t feel like it’ll suddenly assault him as something he’s excluded from.

Maybe Jack’s November legacy of Christmas decorations at Robbie and Laura’s has inured him to it this year, he thinks, amused. Or maybe it’s that Robbie and Laura with the constancy of their welcome have somehow—He drums his fingers absently on the steering wheel, struck by this thought.

 _“James.”_ Laura, inside the house already, front door wide open, has paused in the hallway, glaring out at him.

===

Laura must be more tired than she’s admitted. She seems to keep going into a daze gazing at his hands as he tends busily to the various ingredients that go into this sauce, his shirt sleeves rolled back to protect them. He’s enjoying the solidity of their stone mortar and pestle and the wooden handles of their heavy-bottomed pans, as well as the range of fresh ingredients he has to cook with. He really should keep his own kitchen better-stocked and do this more often. Maybe stick on a podcast for company. But he’s also, just now, enjoying this conversation with Laura.

“I think he enjoys the unpredictable nature of his more complicated efforts,” he explains to her. The challenge of it. That’s why he sort of—goes off-piste when it comes to just following a recipe. Gets his own ideas.”

“Yes. But it’s the unpredictable nature of what results, God preserve us. The canoe was a safer hobby. You wouldn’t fancy resume cooking tuition, would you? On a don’t-run-before-you-can-walk basis? He went straight from years of microwavable ready-meals to adapting recipes with barely a pause in between—”

She comes to a halt as Robbie suddenly appears in the doorway. He doesn’t look in the least bit surprised to see James. Well, James’s car is still in the driveway, of course. He just shakes his head at them both. “I know you heard me coming,” he assures Laura as he kisses her.

James bends his attention to his sauce, stirring, hiding his amusement. It tickles him the way that Robbie persists in seeing every attempt that Laura makes to let him know the issues with his cooking as simply part of her teasing him. He’s taken by surprise to feel the sudden clasp of a warm, rough palm on his own shoulder through the thin cotton of his shirt as Robbie peers over his shoulder into the saucepan.

When James turns to look at Laura, she’s grimacing comically at him, looking severely torn between simply taking the path of least resistance and agreeing with Robbie’s idea that they were just winding him up or taking this opportunity to have yet another go at enlightening him.

“Dinner’s ready,” he tells them both with a grin, saving her the effort.

===

“Well, that was a very successful audition,” Robbie tells him as they settle on the couch. “I think you’ve got the job.” They had both seemed to really enjoy the meal, pleasing James.

“I can show you how to make that,” he offers. “It’s not that complicated.”

“No,” Robbie tells him.

“No?” Cooking lessons are apparently a non-starter. Unluckily for Laura. Robbie’s looking at her, though, and she’s making a thoughtful face back at him. He seems to come to some decision.

“You’re on the cooking rota now, James,” he says, with a nod.

“I’m not sure you can delegate to me any more,” James points out. “I checked with Innocent as soon as you showed up at work again and she said you’re there as a consultant.”

“I bloody know you did. First chance you got. An’ I’m not delegating. I’m relinquishing my turn to you.”

“Just like he relinquished that ticket.” Laura nods, between them. “He’s a generous man. Tuesdays, I think. We have our staff meeting every Tuesday evening. It’ll be good to rest assured that I have a proper meal to look forward to after that.”

“And Fridays,” adds Robbie. “We’re relinquishing those days to you—what d’you mean a proper meal?” he asks Laura. “Tuesdays were my day.”

Laura sips her wine, her eyes meeting James’s in a silent exaggerated plea.

“Tuesdays,” agrees James, immediately. Then he takes in what’s really being offered. Fridays were always when he and Robbie used to have a pint after work, as a regular thing. Not like their midweek ones, often casually arranged as they left the office, but a routine that had formed and solidified over the years, something James had come to look forward to with private pleasure, inevitably leading onto a meal at the pub or a takeaway back at Robbie’s and another couple of beers. And often to those nights spent on Robbie’s couch.

And now he’s being offered Fridays, returned to him again, as something to rely on. The warmth of Robbie and Laura’s home and their welcome, reliably there for him, expecting his presence. Cementing his place here. They’re somehow telling him that they really do, despite their having each other and all they need, still want him here. With both of them. He watches them as they fall into arguing over Laura’s remark about a proper meal and there’s a surge of odd emotion welling up and threatening to overwhelm him. In someone else it would probably find its way into words. In James the struggle in battening it back down makes him cast his glance about, searching rather desperately for a distraction, and he finds it in the first thing he can focus on, right beside him at his end of the couch.

“That’s a new lamp,” he observes rather abruptly.

They both stop.

“Yes,” says Laura, looking at him, then narrowing her gaze into a frown. “The other one is upstairs now,” she says slowly. “You read at night, don’t you, James? You’d strain your eyes by that bedside lamp. And I keep meaning to say—take anything you want up to read.”

James’s eyes slide sideways to the bookshelves.

“Something there you’ve got your eye on?” Robbie asks, amused. “He was poking around your bookshelves with approval,” he tells Laura, “that time you lent us your house when everything went pear-shaped on the Miranda Thornton case.”

“Were you, now?” asks Laura. “Man of good taste. Well, go ahead.” But her eyes are still quite concerned, assessing him. He really can’t take it.

“Later,” he says, recollecting himself. “Thank you,” And he finds an excuse in his hand, draining his wine glass and going to refill it in the kitchen. Because the knowledge that they’ve also matter-of-factly readied the room upstairs to meet this need of his isn’t really helping him to regain his composure and he badly needs a moment to himself now.

“Let him go,” he hears Laura say suddenly from the living room. There’s a silence from Robbie. “I mean it,” she murmurs a bit lower but he can still feel her understanding as clearly as if she’s right beside him. “If that’s what he wants.”

And when James goes back in he can head over to browse the shelves undisturbed until his hand fastens on one of Laura’s books that he’s been silently coveting. They both affect mild, unconvincing surprise, and then just bid him goodnight quite casually, when he says that, actually, he’s tired enough himself that if they really don’t mind…

===

Maybe he should have stayed downstairs with them, earlier tonight, James reflects, slouching down a bit once his cigarette is safely lit and stretching his legs out in front of him. The lure of the book had slowly lost its appeal once it had done its job and he’d regained his equilibrium. He’d been lying in darkness by the time he’d heard their footfalls approaching up the stairs and the comfortingly familiar hushed sounds of them getting ready to retire for the night. But sleep had proved elusive in the end after the stirred-up feelings of this evening.

Silly, really, getting het up like that about a cooking rota.

And if he’d taken it in his stride and spent the evening downstairs, the distraction of talking with them both does tend to send him off to sleep with other thoughts in his head, leftovers from their conversations, far more pleasant distractions than those can plague James at night.

He finds the midnight quiet relaxing now. It’s a still night and there’s just enough moonlight to set interesting shadows around the enclosure of their garden. Until he’s startled by a swathe of sudden artificial light reaching out from the kitchen. The door opens and Laura appears, looking out at him. He lifts a hand in greeting, signalling that he’s okay, and she disappears again. Leaving him to his own devices like earlier this evening. Although he finds he’s almost sorry this time. The kitchen light clicks off again, returning the garden to its more accustomed night time state.

Then Laura reappears, coat on, making her way across the grass to him. “Hello.”

James reaches to tug one of the chairs closer beside his own in welcome and she drops into it, drawing her booted feet up so she’s curled sideways, within the frame of its wooden arms. She really is small. That coat she has on over what seem to be silk pyjamas is Robbie’s jacket and she looks comfortably wrapped in it. She’s taking her time gazing around her garden, as if she’s unused to its contours in winter in the dark.

They must have sat out here last summer, Laura and Robbie, when they would have just moved here, to their own home together. The pergola would have been woven over with a roof of agreeably bending boughs, covered with leaves that would have rustled softly and moved to reveal the deepening blue of a slow, promising dusk over the course of those impossibly long midsummer evenings. While James would have been under the different blue of a Mediterranean sky.

Laura shifts so that one of her hands is tucked under the folds of James’s coat-sleeved arm, as it rests on the arm of his chair, and she settles back again.

“I have trouble sleeping if I’m overtired,” she mentions after a moment.

“Oh. I see.”

“Is that your problem, James?” she asks gently. He looks at her. “You don’t sleep very well, do you?”

“I never have,” he owns.

She seems to accept this. Without questioning him further about when _never_ started. She just nods. “I take it that your GP has tried—”

“Yeah. She lets me go on the odd course of tablets to knock me back into a better pattern when things are really bad. But only as a short term measure.”

“Yes,” Laura looks at him ruefully. “And she probably tells you—”

“That a job where I’m on call at nights is not the best line of work to be in,” James recites in his best lecturing tones to amuse her. “Yes.” He shrugs. “And I know it’s counterproductive to stay in bed too long if you can’t sleep—that I should get up and engage in distracting but non-stimulating activity.” His imitation of his GP is not distracting Laura, though. She just looks at him, waiting. “I couldn’t,” he finds himself saying. “You weren’t permitted to get up in school. Or have lights on to read.” Not that he’d known what strategies to employ, anyway, when sleep had first deserted him.

At Cambridge, with more freedom to set his own schedule, he’d discovered he could work around it, pull late nights studying and not have to address the issue too much. But then, inevitably, it had become yet another problem he couldn’t ignore at the seminary, when he had chosen to return to a life of routines set by others again. And had felt rather desperate at times, clockwatching in the first early light of dawn, after a restless night, in the knowledge of the inexorable approach of the bell for early morning prayers and a long day ahead.

“Spain was good,” he confides to Laura. “You could take a siesta there.” He does seem to sleep better in smaller stretches.

“Well, and I heard you were on a long walk,” she agrees. “Tiring yourself out.” He grins at her. “He missed you, you know,” she says.

James draws on his cigarette, eyeing her sideways. But she doesn’t seem to expect a response. When she starts to speak again, she seems to be addressing her words up to the starry sky. “He always became very animated, anytime your name was mentioned. Almost like he was relieved to be given permission to talk about you for a while.”

James, taken aback by a sudden bittersweet pang, can’t reply to this at all. Laura, still gazing upwards, doesn’t seem to mind. But he wants to thank her for that, to offer her something in return. “Did you know you have hedgehogs at night in your garden?” he says brusquely after a moment.

“Shouldn’t they be hibernating?” she asks, turning her head back to him, smiling. At his utter non-sequitur, he thinks.

Come to think of it, it has been a little while since he was out here and watched one nosing its way across the grass in the relative safety of what it had assumed was the deserted garden. The more recent times he’s stayed, the periods of wakefulness that inevitably punctuate his night have been a bit shorter and he’s managed to fall back asleep before being driven to get up.

And right on cue Laura is asking, “Do you sleep better in your own flat, James?” And her voice is so kind, but she looks so rueful at the thought, that it makes it easy to be honest.

“No,” he admits. “I sleep better here.”

She breaks into a smile that makes him smile right back at her this time, something within him taken by her finding pleasure in this.

“And is there anything that helps you sleep?”

“Music. It’s fine. I have my headphones. I’ll listen to my iPod when I go up if I need to.”

“You do know you can come over any time, don’t you? You know we mean that? Just—any time you feel like it.”

James, still unexpectedly warmed by her pleasure in the effect that being here has on him, and the realisation that he’s somehow managed to let her know that, recognises that he does know that, really. He nods at her.

She rests her head for a moment against his shoulder, a brief, light press. “I think I can sleep now,” she says on a yawn. And she gets up, pulling Robbie’s jacket more securely around her. “Don’t stay out here too long.”

It’s when she’s almost at the kitchen door and comes to halt that he suddenly belatedly realises—“It’s almost like I can hear Robbie snoring from here,” she says, sounding confused.

And the different snippets that James has heard passing under their room, en route to his spot in their garden, come straight to mind, one from Robbie in particular, when he’d swear—well, he’d swear it had been him Robbie was talking about— _Loyal to a fault, that’s what he is. Always has been. Innocent discovered that to her cost, early on._

And James, though he opens his mouth, can’t tell Laura, even after the conversation they’ve just had, that there’s a vent, that he’s heard comments and interchanges like that when he passes close to the spot she’s paused at.

Laura is shaking her head now, anyway, dismissing the possibility, and heading inside, so it’s too late, really, too late to find the courage to ask her what Robbie had meant when he said that. To ask why they would have been up late talking about him.

 

============================================================

 

“Oh, good, you’re here.” Better make it sound like she’s been waiting for them instead of fervently hoping up until the eleventh hour that they’ll linger contentedly in the pub together.

Her original suggestion had been that Robbie bring James back straight after work, considering she was leaving work early today, anyway. That had proved a thoroughly over-ambitious schedule and it’s just as well, in retrospect, that Robbie’s face had fallen at that idea.

“Ah,” he’d said, his hand going to the back of his neck in a familiar gesture of awkwardness that had let her know this was more important than his words were suggesting. “We always—I mean, I usually take him for a pint on his birthday. A pie and a pint. It’s not much, like. But it started back the first year he was with me—”

He sometimes seems unsure, as he and James continue to fall back into all the private, unspoken rituals that had marked their years together, if that’s really okay with her. It had shaken him to realise that his obliviousness to James’s feelings could have caused James pain and she also suspects that he carries some guilt over how she would have felt during the start of their relationship when this lay unspoken between them. She still sees him pull himself up occasionally now. Doubting himself. Which really isn’t what she wants.

There’s something that’s making him resist talking to James about this. About what’s developing here between the three of them. And she’s fairly sure it’s not any reluctance over James being a bloke. Having watched them both, with a slight fascination, over all those years ever since Robbie and his sergeant had first started to present, unbeknownst to them, more and more as a pair, she privately thinks that now that Robbie’s opened his mind to that idea, he finds that that aspect stirs his interest far more than he’d acknowledge. Just as James always has.

But she can’t quite get to the bottom of why he is holding back. He insists that James needs more time before they spring it on him. And he could well be right. But she also suspects that that’s something he’s telling himself because, for some reason she can’t work out yet, it applies to Robbie equally too.

“Of course the two of you should go for his birthday pint,” she’d said, kissing his cheek. “He’d like that. It’ll give me a bit more time too.” _That_ had turned out to hold more truth than she’d thought.

It’s perhaps appropriate that something as simple as making a birthday cake for the complicated proposition that is James should have turned out to be a multi-layered task and rather harder than it had looked at first glance, trying to find the balance between flavours that could compete instead of enhancing each other if she can’t get the right proportions to bring them together.

There had been something symbolic in that that she’d have let her mind pursue if she wasn’t also wrestling at the time with a sugar thermometer that she’d swear had ceased to function, two different saucepans for filling and icing whose boiling and melting points had to be timed precisely and a kitchen clock that had been ticking cheerfully onwards, reminding her that, once she got this assembled, there still had to be time for these concoctions to set.

At this point, she’s mainly surprised that she’s actually managed it before she hears them come in. But her surprise seems to be nothing in comparison to Inspector Hathaway’s.

James stops a few steps into the kitchen, staring, at what Laura is rather pleased to see is a darkly-shining glaze of chocolate over the cake.

Robbie grins at her, appreciatively. “Ah. Dessert,” he says to James, placing a hand between James’s shoulder blades to prompt him further into the room.

“Is that the one—”

“It is,” Robbie tells him, as proud as if he’d been the one who’d produced it, she thinks, helplessly. But he moves across to stand behind her and gives her shoulders a squeeze, and she rests her head back against his chest, watching James.

There had been an illustrated recipe in the paper last weekend. James had thought it looked amazing, had said that he’d had something like that in Spain and they should just imagine the pleasure of a few forkfuls of it with a strong cup of coffee. She had put a base of espresso in the chocolate of the sponge too, in deference to that, to further counteract the sweet saltiness of the caramel.

“But you don’t like dark chocolate,” he says to Robbie now. “You say it’s messing with a perfectly decent foodstuff and that there’s nothing wrong with a decent Mars Bar—”

“Well—it’s still cake,” Robbie says. “I’m sure we can manage a bit.”

“Not his birthday, is it, James?” she asks.

He’s frowning at her. “But this must have taken ages.”

“I baked the cake yesterday evening. So not that much to do today.” Robbie probably believes that. James doesn’t. And he hadn’t even been here to witness a fair bit of cursing when she’d missed the exact point when the salted caramel should have been taken off the heat and had had to make a second attempt at it. No need to tell him that.

“It’s quite big,” he says.

“You can bring the rest into the office,” she tells him patiently.

He’s still too taken aback to do anything but protest aloud as he tries to make sense of this. It’s his birthday and it’s a cake. It shouldn’t be quite this much to take in. But it is. He’s even too surprised to remember to thank her politely. He’s still looking at her, startled. But it’s suddenly painful the way that something within him is surprised by care. She presses her head back hard into the warm, steadying comfort of Robbie.

“Stick a candle in it so we can sing him happy birthday,” says Robbie, rescuing them both. James obviously thinks he’s joking. Watching his expression as his eyes go from Robbie, who’s thoroughly enjoying himself, back to her in mild disbelief, as they proceed to do just that—it’s certainly amusing.

“Well. That was—” He seems to be searching for an adjective that will do justice to their performance.

“Operatic?” suggests Robbie.

“Discordant?” she suggests. Rather more accurately.

“Present,” says Robbie, unceremoniously, apparently deciding that the next part of what constitutes a proper birthday celebration needs to be observed, and reaching for the gift bag on the breakfast bar. She’d have thought that opening the wine might be next. She’d certainly been almost at that stage just before they got here, having just finished rapidly clearing the evidence of all her endeavours.

“Thank you,” James says, pulling the iPod dock half out of the bag, and obviously trying to muster a better response amid his surprise. This time she understands it, though. Because he has one already, of course.

“It’s not the most altruistic of choices where Robbie is concerned, I’m afraid, James.”

“It’s like that cafetiere you gave me once. Ulterior motives. Can’t take the noise of the alarm on that bloody phone of yours going off any more,” Robbie says, twinkling at him.

They both watch him work this one out. “You’re all right with me keeping it here?”

“Aye. More than all right—I’d positively encourage it. Try and choose something other than chanting monks first thing, though, would you?” Robbie asks in long-suffering tones. But he’s smiling at James and his amusement only increases when she tilts her head back to roll her eyes at him. Chanting monks, though? Hopefully that’s one of their private jokes with no actual basis in fact. Hopefully. Still—

“Don’t pay any heed to him, James,” she assures him. “You can listen to whatever you want up there. If I can sleep through his snoring now, it won’t bother us. Music helps you fall asleep, doesn’t it?” Robbie had told her he’d had no idea, until James started to stay here, that James’s insomnia was quite that bad. That he sometimes used to hear slight noises at odd hours when James crashed on the couch in his various flats, so he’d have had some idea that James had been up during the night but any time he’d ask the next morning if James had slept okay, he’d receive a vague confirmation that he had.

James nods at her now and she can see that he’s remembering her discovering him in the garden and him letting her know something of the difficulty he finds in gaining proper rest. “Thank you,” he says again. And while his kiss to her cheek is clumsy as he bends down to her to deliver it, and a sharp corner of the box that he’s still holding juts against her hip, his eyes are also warm with pleasure now, and there’s a slight flush on his cheeks.

He’s begun not just to relax into, or even show himself receptive to, but sometimes even seems to want her touch now.

It’s starting to remind her of her curious courtship with Robbie—when he’d happily take her arm and offer his old-fashioned chivalry to her in a way that just—well she wouldn’t have thought she’d find that charming in a man, but it suits Robbie Lewis. And he’d try to take steps like inviting her to the Opera. And then, any time they’d come close to anything approaching more intimate territory—he’d pull back again. With Robbie it had been grief and almost an inability, in his utter loyalty, to let anyone into the place in his heart that he’d kept solely for Val for years. With James—she can’t even put a name on what drives James, but she knows that she and Robbie will be slowly nudging aside those barriers and then they’ll somehow come up against another one. And that he seems to put them up almost despite himself. Much as Robbie had too.

The real question may be why she’s landed up drawn to two ridiculously kindhearted, immensely loyal men who struggle to communicate at the best of times, are different in ways that rouse her attention, but more alike than either of them would believe, and have something about them that she just finds hopelessly endearing. Even more so when you put them together. She watches Robbie’s love for James and still wonders that James somehow just doesn’t see it. Responds to it, but doesn’t see it.

And now, as James finally settles at the table and Robbie starts to busy himself with that cafetiere—although Laura does not care if coffee would enhance the taste of her creation best, she, for one, is having a decent glass of Barolo with it—James’s eyes keep going back to the cake. She feels far more rewarded for her efforts than if he had been casually, immediately pleased to see it.

Even if Robbie is definitely going to be the one on baking duty this day next year.

 

============================================================

 

“It’s the smell of the pine needles, isn’t it?” James asks. The tree, that carefully-selected real tree, does look very good, Laura has to own. With the softly glowing white lights set so carefully amongst the dark green. James had been so perfectionist about the arrangement of those lights this evening, and of her antique glass ornaments that he’d so admired, so that they gently reflect a sheen of light now too.

Robbie had teased him about it being a Friday and him slacking off on his assigned duties, but he’d then just taken over dinner. And it is rather lovely now, sitting on the couch, with just those lights and the firelight tonight. And Robbie’s arm lightly around her shoulders, and James on her other side, just mesmerised by the tree.

“Especially in the warmth,” James adds. “And when there’s a tinge of smoke from a log fire added in to the scent. Until the first year I was at school, I hadn’t realised how different it was with an artificial one.”

She doesn’t understand that this isn’t just idle, relaxed chatter from him until she takes in that Robbie has gone quite still beside her.

“Did you not go home during the holidays, lad?”

Did James mean to bring this up, then? She knows only that Robbie knows so very little about James’s background. That he’s never asked. And even now James can just say _no, I didn’t_ and leave it at that. Or can evade the question entirely.

But James is motionless beside her now, too, the same relaxed posture as usual, but it’s stilled into lines of tension.

“My mother died when I was twelve,” he says, his voice careful.

_Twelve._

Robbie is just gazing at the fire, giving him room for this. It’s only that stillness that betrays his feelings.

“And my father—well, he’d always been distant, I didn’t know him particularly well. My mother had been different, warmer and—maybe he’d needed her to know how to relate to me—anyway, everything changed then. We left Crevecoeur and I went to school. On a scholarship.”

He didn’t _particularly know_ his remaining parent? She’s unsure, her mind racing ahead, how much else that’s hiding, or if it’s the bleakness of it in itself that makes her want to stir restlessly and reach out for him. But Robbie’s hand, resting on her arm, is clasping her firmly and she doesn’t know if that’s for himself, hearing this, and after so long, or more to stop her from breaking into this. So, taking the cue he’s giving her, she aims not to betray too much of a reaction. When she tries to even look at James, who has been casting a quick glance at them, he turns his attention straight back to the lights of the tree.

“School wasn’t bad, really,” he assures them, after a moment while the flames flicker cheerfully in the hearth. _As schools go,_ she completes that sentence in her head. Robbie had told her he’d been head boy. And he must have excelled academically, of course, and been guided towards Cambridge. And had his musical talent nurtured too. “I mean—it was fairly typical of a prestigious public school, but that meant they had overseas pupils so there was always a set-up where you could board throughout any of the holidays. I mean—it wasn’t like I never saw my father, it just wasn’t a regular or expected thing that I went home.”

“How come—” Robbie starts, sounding almost angry. And then just stops.

“It was a full scholarship,” James explains. Although she really doubts that Robbie was asking about the actual practicalities of how James’s father had managed to effectively abandon him so completely to strangers’ care, however well-intentioned that succession of school staff might have been. It’s little wonder that something in James had cleaved so strongly from early on to the steady constancy that is Robbie Lewis. “My mother had found about that and done the application before she—it was very sudden for her in the end. But it did feel sometimes as she’d almost known I’d need a place to go to. She’d always thought I was so clever—”

It’s what’s left between the lines. And James’s voice amid the silence of the room.

Robbie takes a sip of his wine, using the movement to let his gaze slide sideways across her to James. But James seems lost in contemplating the depths of his own glass now.

A charred log reaches the limit of its structure and collapses into blackened shards, with a hiss, the flames rising briefly up to welcome it. And then James has put his wine glass down on the coffee table and is propelled to his feet in one definite movement. “I’ll just—” and he disappears into the shadowed recess of the kitchen.

Robbie’s thumb brushes briefly at the corner of her eye where there’s a traitorous sting. His arm settles back more firmly round her.

“Best let him be,” he says in low tones to her. “Probably needs a minute. Poor sod.” She wonders how long it’s been since James has voiced even this much aloud. If Robbie hadn’t known.

Then there’s the sound of the key turning in the back door as James must be opening it to go outside. Instead of coming back in to them.

She turns to look at Robbie. She recognises the look of him, somehow—she’s seen it on a couple of cases, years back, cases that had gone horribly wrong with James somehow at their centre. Robbie’s torn between wanting to voice his concern to James and holding back the way he does, just watching him.

Laura nudges her head briefly against the solid warmth of his shoulder. He stays still beside her, irresolute.

She reaches for her wine in silence. And, as she leans back again, he’s moving forward, rising suddenly to his feet and heading for the still-dark kitchen.

The relief makes her shoulders subside so her glass tilts precariously for a moment. She steadies it with her other hand and leans back against the bulk of the couch’s back while she gazes at that tree. There’s the sound of Robbie's voice, so James must have stopped, leaning against the wall beside the kitchen door, instead of retreating down the garden. And Robbie must have left the door open. After a moment, there’s the sound of James’s voice, too.

They won’t be talking any further about this, she knows. It’s not their way.

But they stay out there, both without coats, for the length of time it would take James to smoke a cigarette. If he was drawing on it, instead of relaxing with it. And the silence and the peaceable noises of the fire, as she sits in the middle of the couch, are punctuated by the sound of odd inserts from Robbie. And each time there’s a longer one in response from James.

When they come back in, seeming to carry some of the chill air with them both, James sits back down beside her, but Robbie goes over to add more logs to the fire. Extra warmth for James. Unusual at this hour when they would generally be winding the conversation to a close and letting the fire die down.

She wonders if this is what they do, then, when anything comes up to rock James’s equilibrium, their equilibrium together. Do they just extend their time together, like they do after a case, when they disappear off together for a quiet pint? Without actually discussing the matter in hand? Does James need to know that things are back to normal and he won’t be pressed further?

She tells herself that it’s best to follow the lead that Robbie’s instincts, honed by years of dealing with James, are giving her here. And besides, James isn’t really looking at her. So she gets up as well to go and open another bottle. But she finds herself putting her hand on his arm as she stands, all the same. He raises his eyes briefly to meet hers. Oh, God. It’s too hard not to. She bends on impulse to kiss his cheek. “Thank you for telling us that, James.”

He nods at her, briefly.

===

Laura’s not asleep either, Robbie would warrant. Late as they all were coming upstairs tonight.

But she’s lying silent in the dark on her own side of the bed, much as he is. He stares upwards at that accustomed spot where the moon would penetrate the gap at the top of the curtains if it was up to the task tonight. It had been a sliver of itself when he’d kept James company outside the kitchen door as he’d slowly composed himself. When Robbie had remarked on it, James, almost gratefully, had taken the chance to talk about gibbous phases and waxing crescents. Rather than what he’d just told them. About his mam. He’d answered the questions Robbie had ventured and seemed to know immediately what stage of its journey the moon was at. Hard to know just how many nights he’s awake to check on it.

Robbie lies as still and as silent as Laura does, half-lost in his thoughts and too alert to rest and it’s not until the creak of the stairs finally comes that he realises the exact nature of the sound he’s been listening for.

Laura rolls over, her voice almost pleading in the dark “Oh, Robbie, go to him—”

“Shush, now, course I’m going. S’alright.”

“Sorry—”

He kisses her forehead. “Get some sleep.”

If James is surprised to see him appear, he gets a chance to conceal it. Robbie’s turned on the kitchen light to give him fair warning of his approach and get a bit of light spreading out from the house into the garden. James does eye him a little warily as Robbie settles on one of the wooden slatted chairs, next to his, giving Robbie his cue here. _All right, still not going to ask anything more, lad, he wants to say. Just going to get you back indoors in a better frame of mind to get some sleep._

Because, bloody hell, it’s freezing out here.

“Going to have to get you one of those patio heaters for Christmas,” he says mildly. “The ones shaped like a lamp post. And you know that’s going to be a bugger to wrap.”

James lips move into a quick smile, probably picturing Robbie cursing as he attempts that.

It’s brief, but it’s a start.

James tilts his chair back and stops with it canted back at an odd angle, looking upwards. Laura had said he seemed very used to being out here at night. She’d also said that his problems with sleep dated back to when James was at school. Which Robbie is now seeing in a whole new light, after realising that going off to school had followed so soon after losing his mam, and, effectively, his home. It doesn’t seem fair to ask right now why on earth he’d never said his sleep was so bad when he used to stay at Robbie’s. He must have slipped outside countless times while Robbie slept, rather than disturb him. And yet he’d casually agreed to stay whenever Robbie had offered. At least there had been a garden of sorts in most of that succession of flats that Robbie had moved through after the loss of his own family home, a house that he couldn’t keep after losing the heart of it. He’d never settled properly after his return to Oxford until now, here, with Laura. And, hopefully, recently, James.

James starts to move restlessly up and down again, a muffled rhythmic thump of wood on wood. The sleeve of his coat, of the arm that isn’t holding a cigarette, brushes lightly against Robbie’s jacket with his movements. Robbie wants to reach out and put a hand on that arm to still him. Not that that would do any good in itself. It’s James’s internal restlessness he can’t soothe. Whether he’s trying to move himself away again from those memories of his childhood and an earlier, different life before he’d lost his mother. Or whether he’s stirred up sitting here beside Robbie because he’s so unaccustomed to revealing anything at all. Either way—Robbie watches him as James focuses straight upwards again. And then he uses one foot to tilt his own chair and casts his own head back.

The moon may not be up to much but the amount of stars more than make up for it, multiplying around him as Robbie settles his gaze on the sky. James stills his chair, pausing in position, mirroring Robbie’s movement as he often does.

This particular time, it stirs a memory for Robbie. “D’you remember Laura’s swing?” he asks.

“Yes,” says James after a moment. And then he’s grinning. “Our first official complaint regarding facetiousness, I believe,” he reminisces.

“Aye. But not the last,” Robbie says ruefully.

“No,” James says, still amused. And he resumes his up and down movement. Innocent’s attempts at reprimanding him never had achieved much with James, once he got beyond his very early sergeant days. Not once he’d found his feet.

“It’s Saturday tomorrow. Want to help me put it back up?”

He stills again. “You still have it?”

“Aye. I just took it apart for the move from Laura’s house.”

“And you didn’t want it up in the summer?”

“The summer? I had a list of projects to keep me busy. There was a fair bit to do on the house at first. Always more than you think with these older places. And then—I wanted to make a start on the canoe.”

James chuckles. “From what Laura said about how much of it you really hadn’t got done before you handed it over to the professionals, I think that when you say _make a start_ …”

“I readied the pieces for them,” Robbie says with dignity. Then he gives in. “And the pieces of the swing are still readied and waiting in the shed. Shouldn’t take us too long. Then you can sit on that when you come out here for your fix.”

“Okay,” says James sounding undeniably pleased.

“Want to come back inside now, though? Before you wear a hole in me carefully-laid decking with your tilting?”

“You did _not_ lay that decking,” James informs him. “It’s years old.”

“You know my garden better than I do, now, is that it?” Robbie teases. Although, as he says it, it occurs to him that that’s probably not far off. What with all of James’s lone night time vigils. “Wait till you see it when everything’s out properly,” he says gently. “Be a lot to do in the spring, though, you’ll have to give us a hand then.”

James just nods at this.

But he allows himself to be prompted to his feet after that, when Robbie puts a hand to his shoulder. He pretty much allows himself to be shepherded in and through the house to the foot of the stairs. And Robbie only drops his hand as they remove their coats. The sole light comes from a low lamp left on in the hall at night, as they start to climb to the darker landing.

It’s only as they reach the top of the staircase that it suddenly hits Robbie. He doesn’t want to bid James good night and leave him to hopefully, eventually find sleep. What he wants to do is take his arm and draw him into Robbie and Laura’s room, into his bed with Laura, and take James against him until they can both soothe him into rest. That’s what he wants, not to let James go those few steps along the landing in the other direction.

“James,” he says hoarsely. And James turns, hand on the newel post at the top of the stairs. But he can’t risk landing this on James tonight, not when he’s had the evening he’s just had. James is waiting, though, his expression obscured, a few steps above Robbie, in the strange shadows of the staircase. “Put on your music if you like, lad,” Robbie tells him. He swallows and regains a bit more control of his voice. “Won’t bother us.”

“Thanks,” James says, his voice very low. So as not to disturb Laura when he’s so close to their bedroom door. Then he moves aside to let Robbie move up those last few steps and turns away again. Towards his room that’s next to theirs.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are brief references to suicide, in the context of a case, in this chapter. No details.

“Aye. He’ll be a little while,” says Robbie as Laura’s eyes seek James at his shoulder. “He has to talk to Innocent about today.” There had been entirely too much to explain in a text exchange with Laura and Robbie had settled for telling her that he’d be home at the usual time after all and that he was bringing James with him. Then Innocent, with her usual unerring instinct for when one of her officers might want to avoid her, had collared a reluctant Inspector Hathaway who had been doing his level best to escape the nick in very prompt fashion tonight.

“What was today? Something’s happened since this morning?”

A whole lot has happened and none of it good, since very early this morning when they’d left Laura at the crime scene. The case has been a brief, chaotic mess and has hit the press now. The only small mercy is that it’s resoundingly over. But James, this being his case, has been pulled into doing damage control in public for the first time. So, for reply, Robbie reaches for the remote and clicks on the regional news, then drops down beside her.

“I didn’t see this yet,” he starts to explain. Although what Lizzie had said to Robbie in blunt, rather helpless, fashion, afterwards, was _I told him it wasn’t as bad as he thinks._

But Laura has straightened up on the couch, not really listening to the details of what James has been tasked with getting across to the assembled press, her interest quickened by something else entirely.

“He’s incredibly photogenic, isn’t he? Telegenic, is that what I mean? He’d pass a screen test, that’s for sure. I mean—look at those eyes. The way the dark blue background sets them off—”

Robbie is too worried by the little tells of stress in James’s voice and bearing and in the rhythms of his speech. He’s in pure defensive mode and that never goes down well. But Robbie can, and will, say aloud, rather gruffly—“He’s a good-looking lad.”

Laura purses her mouth at him, twinkling her amusement.

“Yes, all right.”

“That’ll be him, now,” she says, getting up as the doorbell sounds. But when she lets him in, James, advancing into the living room and being greeted with a vision of his onscreen self, comes to an abrupt halt and almost does a u-turn. “Oh, can we turn that _off?”_

Robbie is slightly fascinated by that _we_ in place of _you_. Almost as if James has settled into having viewing rights here. He can see that Laura, raising her eyebrows in interest behind James’s back, hasn’t missed it either. Then again, James is a bit het up, he’s well displeased to be confronted by this reminder of his day.

“No,” says Laura.

“No?”

“No,” she repeats, agreeably, settling down on the couch again and tucking her feet back up. “We thought you’d like to watch your onscreen debut with us.”

“And why would I want to do that?” James enquires, dubiously.

“Performance review,” she suggests. “Robbie and I were both just saying how attractive you look. Although I wouldn’t wear that combination next time, James, the contrast of such a dark suit and the white shirt is quite strong under those lights, I don’t think it does your colouring justice—”

“I’m sincerely hoping there won’t _be_ a next—” James, his mind catching up with her words stops himself. “What did you just—oh, never mind. Here.” Looking as if he can’t quite process all this at once, and her casually inserted compliment least of all, he puts a bottle on the coffee table.

“You tracked it down,” Laura says, pleased. It must be one of their wines they were talking about, that are reviewed in the weekend papers. The two of them and their reviews. Any time James lands up here on a weekend morning, they pass sections back and forth over coffee with a _Look at this,_ from one of them to the other—book reviews, theatre, films, restaurants… Robbie, who draws a line well before the stage of actually reading about wine, tends to claim the sports section unchallenged, along with vying for the actual news. And then just listens to them making odd comments at each other about their reading matter. Sometimes they get into a right old argument when their opinions differ. Robbie privately enjoys chipping in with an innocent remark guaranteed to stoke the flames on one side or the other. He’s grown that fond of weekend mornings.

But James, someone who details matter to, keeps remembering. And doing these little things for Laura. He’s dropped down beside her now while they both examine the label on the bottle and Laura starts to read the description aloud. Robbie watches them, James’s attention safely distracted.

It puts the little things he’s done for Robbie over the years in a whole new perspective now. It’s a difficult thought to face up to—that James had been quietly doing things for Robbie for years, simply out of his own kindhearted drive to give the care he’d lost out on himself along the way—but never with the expectation of getting much of it in return. And then Robbie had, so suddenly it must’ve seemed from James’s perspective, turned around and reached for Laura when he’d got to the point where he could properly reach for someone. Pretty much fulfilling James’s expectations in the process. No wonder Laura is always quite so gentle with him, under all her teasing, if she’d seen that sooner than Robbie, what they were doing to James.

A phone starts up, jolting Robbie from his thoughts. James takes the call into the hallway, despite Robbie reaching for the remote to turn down the TV. He fervently hopes it’s not a call out.

“I have to do another one tomorrow,” James announces despairingly, coming back in to them.

“Well,” says Laura, after a moment where the three of them contemplate this. “You’d better head off home and fetch a different shirt, then. Have you still got that light grey one you used to wear? There was a tinge—it was more of a blue-grey undertone. And not such a dark suit, James, with it, of course, I’d suggest—”

“Would you like to come over and give me a wardrobe consultation?” James suggests dryly.

Robbie is thoroughly amused to see Laura looking like she’s actually considering the idea. “No, I’ll get dinner started,” she says eventually. “It doesn’t seem fair to subject you to the dubious hit and miss nature of Robbie’s culinary efforts after the day you’ve just had—”

Robbie sits up. “Hey—”

“Would you like me to recall some of your more memorable misses? James, what are you waiting for? There’ll be a nice bottle opened by the time you get back,” she entices him. “Maybe even this one. Or, tell you what—we’ll keep this until after you’ve wowed them all with your second television appearance. Promise.”

James is looking undeniably amused at her new descriptor on Robbie’s cooking—he has been here for most of the less well-received efforts, actually. Well—he aids and abets Laura in mocking Robbie’s cooking. They vie with other to come up with new ways of disparaging Robbie’s more adventurous ideas, for fun. That’s what it is. Not the cooking, as such. Robbie’s fairly sure. But Robbie does tend to take more than his usual turns cooking on evenings when James is here. It’s rather nice to potter round the kitchen and listen to them gently arguing in here or filling each other in on their day. Or to have one of them come in to him with their wine glass and join him.

James is pulling his coat back on now, looking better than he had when he first came in. It seems to be settled that he’s staying tonight. Laura has managed to arrange it without exactly asking. How’d she do that? Well, Robbie’s glad. Between fretting over today, fretting over tomorrow and, more worryingly, fretting over what’s actually happened in this case that hasn’t ended well—James is just better off here tonight. There’s a certain relief in having him close at hand. It’s the same way it used to be at the end of a bad case when his sergeant would get that despairing look about him and it was easier to make going for a pint into unacknowledged code for bring him back to the flat for a few beers and James eventually stopping for the night. That used to sort of take him out of his head a bit even as it helped drive the worst of the day from Robbie’s mind, too. It’s good to be able to do that again now, to keep him here, with more than a couch to offer him.

“Bring a few of your suits over,” Laura says, mischief in her eyes. “I want to see which one sets off that shirt best.” And James pauses in the act of patting his pockets for his car keys, to consider this. “Let me see what you’ve got. You can always leave some of them here. Lots of spare space in the wardrobe in your room. Save you having to go home to change some mornings when you’ve stayed.”

“Oh. Okay.” And he heads out, still distracted.

Robbie wouldn’t have thought that anyone would be allowed input into what James selects to wear, it all seems too carefully considered to allow other folk’s viewpoints in. But apparently he’s going to let Laura—who, bloody hell, has now got him to agree to keeping more of his things here. And she calls Innocent crafty?

===

He does look better in that suit. Robbie would be damned if he could explain why seeing James in the suits of his sergeant days just feels better to him, but the lighter grey of that shirt against the darker grey of that suit—he’ll look good at the press conference, no doubt. And maybe that knowledge will help him keep his cool. But James, who seems to be eschewing breakfast at the table with them this morning in favour of quickly swallowing down a strong coffee, standing by the sink, sets the cup down too sharply and splashes black coffee on the pale blue silk of his tie.

 _“Fuck,”_ he says. Then— _“Sorry.”_ He sounds more het up than apologetic, though. He really just hates the prospect of all this, doesn't he?

Laura is rising to her feet. “Robbie, give me yours.”

“What?”

“Your tie.”

Oh. Robbie starts to undo his tie and then Laura’s deft fingers are on his, over his, helping and she’s standing very close, giving him a quick, direct smile.

“James,” she prompts, glancing behind her. James, watching them both rather wide-eyed, seems to come to and starts to divest himself of his own tie.

“That's it,” Laura says approvingly, and then Robbie feels the undulating pressure along his neck as she tugs his tie gently through the tunnel of his collar. James’s eyes follow her as she brings it over to him. And she take his arm to move him closer to the kitchen window, reaches up and lifts his collar, and then stretches to loop both ends around his neck. James, with a slight breath of a laugh at the height difference, obligingly dips his head briefly to help her. Laura, with Robbie’s tie now safely in place on James, starts to knot it.

“You'll need to get another one, love,” she prompts Robbie without turning around. “The navy with the pinstripe goes better with that shirt, anyway.” But Robbie doesn't want to move. He wants to sit here and watch her. He wants to study the look on James’s face as he gazes down at her, backlit by the early morning light coming through the window.

Has no one ever done this for James, then?

Val would do it so often for Robbie—expertly looping a slightly better knot than Robbie did, distractedly some mornings over the years when Robbie was leaving for work, taking a brief moment to exchange a smile with him in the midst of the needs and demands of two small children, or to share an exasperated glance while arguing with a recalcitrant teenager over breakfast. And she’d always attended to it as they got ready on any of their too-rare evenings out that had called for the formality of a suit. As Laura does now, something she had simply started to do quite naturally, taking Robbie warmly by surprise the first time someone had reprised the task for him.

But James looks like he's never had anyone perform this little gesture that speaks of everyday casual intimacy—because, of course, that's what he's never had. He’s never had long enough for those routines to form. _I think what he had with you is the most that he’s had._ Robbie suddenly can't take that slight frown of astonishment at something so simple, that James should be able to take for granted.

He finds himself on his feet and his hand is on James’s shoulder, warm through the thin cotton of James’s shirt –

“You'll do well today,” he assures him, his hand cupping that shoulder in a brief squeeze. James drops his head slightly, as if that's a sort of blessing. And Laura, finishing her ministrations, draws one finger down James’s cheek as she turns away, adding her own light passing touch to Robbie’s more solid grip.

===

Later, he watches from the corridor, as James, in Robbie’s own tie, deals with the press, his tells of nerves probably not apparent to anyone who hasn't spent years watching him as Robbie has.

But frustration is beginning to creep into his voice. Robbie’s glance roves over Lizzie standing at the back of the room, who has stiffened a little, picking up on it, and then back over the reporters’ assembled alert heads, to land on James. He fixes him with a look. It only takes a moment and James’s eyes slide suddenly sideways to meet his for the briefest of instants. “And that’s as much as we know at this point,” he continues, in a rather more level voice as his gaze returns to the watchful journalists. “Next question?” Robbie removes himself from the doorframe and continues on his way. No point distracting him further.

He almost collides with Innocent who has been standing there watching too, for God knows how long.

“Robbie,” she says, with a smile at him. Robbie is suddenly put in mind of Laura’s view: _She knew he needed you._ Not that James isn’t well capable of managing this and far more. Just needs a bit of reminding of that sometimes, that’s all.

===

James lifts a hand to his face and peers through his fingers at the television as if he can neither bear to watch nor look away. “I don’t sound like that. My voice doesn’t sound like that. I’m pretty sure I don’t—”

“Much better,” says Laura, approvingly, pulling his hand back down. “Look at you. Far more confident. And look at them, the way they’re focused on you, getting drawn in to what you’re saying. They’re responding to that. Well done. And that suit _does_ work better onscreen,” she says in evident satisfaction. “I obviously missed my true vocation as an on-set dresser. Dressing my two men, anyway. That tie suits your colouring better than Robbie’s, actually,” she says, musing.

“Oi,” Robbie says in mock-indignation. Then he gives James a long-suffering look. “Keep it,” he offers. “Our resident expert here seems to think it goes with your shirt. Or eyes. Or summat. Either way…”

James tucks his chin in, looking down at the tie, bemused.

“Oh, for goodness sake,” says Laura, impatient, drawing herself upright and reaching to flip his collar up and start undoing the knot. “He’s right when he says to keep it, but take it off for now. You are staying, aren’t you, James?”

James frowns, apparently doing a mental inventory of the items of clothing he’d brought over and coming up short. “I only brought over this shirt that you said would—no clean shirt,” he says reluctantly. But Robbie doesn’t miss the slight yearning in his expression. “It would make more sense to go home. It’s fine, I haven’t drunk anything, really, I didn’t expect to stay here two nights running—”

“Who’s counting?” Robbie scoffs. But, he realises, as the words leave his mouth, James is. He’s keeping track and holding back behind some mental limit he’s imposed on how often he’ll be here with them like this—

“Hold on.” Laura’s eyes are alight, a slight smile playing around her mouth in anticipation. She rises to go and pull out the fourth, flat, rectangular package that has recently joined Jack’s efforts on the chair that James used to sit in. Robbie, trying to shake off that feeling of rising dismay at James’s inadvertent admission that he’s not, despite it all, willing to just give in to being more a part of their lives here, sends a half-hearted grin in response to James’s enquiring look. James frowns at him.

“Early Christmas present,” Laura says, dropping back down between them and saving Robbie from James’s silent scrutiny. James’s hands close around the paper.

“A clean shirt,” he says, amused, a moment later. He bows his head at her in formal fashion. “Thank you. Just what I wanted,” he says gravely.

“Should be your size,” says Laura, eyeing him. Robbie observes a blush start to steal into James’s expression, even in this soft light.

“Are you able to tell from years of measuring the torsos of male corpses?” James enquires. Robbie nods at him over Laura’s head in rueful confirmation.

“It’s from Robbie too,” protests Laura—“Oh, all right, I chose it. Obviously. It’d be a bit avant-garde for your idea of shirt colours, wouldn’t it, Robbie? Tropical atrocities aside. But it’ll look well on you, James.” And her teasing is slipping into a golden-warm smile as she looks at him.

But she’s not the only one. James smiles suddenly straight back at her. Laura stares at him. He must never have directed one of those utterly wholehearted, utterly defenceless, utterly disarming grins straight at her before. Well, they are a rare blessing, welling straight up from a place of pure pleasure inside James that nothing seems to reach often enough. James has no idea of the effect of them. Come to think of it, Robbie’s never witnessed James grin like that at anyone but himself before. But James is starting to look slightly confused. Robbie’s eyes go back to Laura, who’s just looking at James in silence. Robbie digs a surreptitious elbow against her side and she turns her head to smile at him instead. But rather vaguely. He’d swear her eyes are trying to flit back to take another curious look at James.

Bloody hell. She’s a goner now.

 

 

============================================================

 

Lizzie wants a break. And she’s hoping that James will suggest it. The frequency of her quick glances over at him is building, pulling him out of his absorption. He turns a page in this tedious report, straight-faced. It’s not the worst tactic she’s employing, he has to admit.

His own preferred strategy was to start fidgeting with the items on his desk, as if in dire need of a nicotine fix, while typing away casually one-handedly, until Robbie’s impatient glances found release in a _Go and get us a couple of coffees, then, would you?_ Secure in the knowledge that James would come back from his walk with both fixes satisfied and bearing further appeasement for his boss in the shape of a decent cappuccino.

James could personally do with a very decent latte right now. And if he had twenty minutes to spare from this, he’d get it himself. Because Lizzie, most unluckily, will be quite happy to make do with tea from the canteen. She even likes going there at this time of the morning when everyone else is queuing. Although she also makes his tea perfectly every time, so that he really can’t justify sending her off out of the station in this foul weather in search of what he feels is a far superior choice. It’s an area of her training where she seems to have outwitted him.

“Would you be so kind, Sergeant?” he asks, with exaggerated politeness, giving in and looking up to catch her glance. He’s shaking his head at her quick grin at him as he switches his attention over to the onscreen summary he’s typing.

She comes back far too soon, arriving in front of his desk without the teas. Her eyes are wide and startled, the way she looks when she has something to impart on a case that either distresses her or she knows is bad news for him.

“One of the new PCs said—you know how they exaggerate, sir—but they said that this morning, Laura, Dr Hobson, was attacked by the victim’s brother at a crime scene—”

The phone is in James’s hand before he finishes processing her words. When he gets nothing but the recorded message on Laura’s mobile, he hits the speed-dial for the morgue instead.

He’s told that Dr Hobson is in a post-mortem and will be given his message when she’s finished. So she’s not really hurt. She can’t be hurt. But waiting to find out what’s happened to her seems impossible.

Lizzie is looking at him. She knows Robbie is in Manchester this week. She knows that the summary of this particular report, which, strictly speaking, should be carried out by someone of James’s rank, needs to be on Innocent’s desk by lunchtime. She probably even also knows that Innocent still thinks James has problems delegating certain tasks. Which means they could get away with this if it just seems like James has swung too far in the other direction instead.

James drums his fingers on his desk for one short staccato-punctuated moment as quick, jagged, sharp images enter and leave his mind and his heartrate fails to recapture its normal pace. Lizzie, her eyes on James’s face, inches her fingers towards the binder. An offering, if he’s willing to take it.

“Take your tea-break first, Sergeant,” he tries instructing her as he leaves, pulling on his coat. Lizzie, settling at his own computer, waves that suggestion off, already focused on the screen.

===

Laura, when she finally emerges into the corridor, takes one glance and knows exactly why he’s here.

“Lord, you’re just like him,” she says, resigned, as he comes to an abrupt halt at her appearance. “Pacing like a lost guard dog. Slow down now, James. I’m fine.” But she doesn’t quite look it. And there’s a vivid mark on her arm, very evident in her short-sleeved green scrubs, that’s going to develop into quite a bruise.

She follows his gaze. “Okay. He took hold of me, tried to pull me away from the body—held on longer than he should have. He was quite agitated. It took me by surprise, that’s all.”

“And whose case was it?” he asks, aiming for casual. She’s not in the least bit deceived.

“James.”

“I’ll find out at the station.” He will, too. Any other avenue aside, Lizzie will already know by now. She’s an excellent source of gossip. She seems to be on easy good terms with half the nick. James has learnt more about his colleagues of years in the months since she became his sergeant than he’d ever realised there was to know, back when he and Robbie used to operate in their rather more inward-focused unit of two.

Laura can see the truth in his words. “It’s Alan’s case. But he was right there. He was checking out something upstairs, he called to the uniform on the door and the bloke went up the stairs to talk to him. So the brother, arriving at the wrong moment and finding police tape across his entrance—he just got in to me unseen. SOCO were combing through the other downstairs rooms by then, too. Just bad luck. Anyway, at the first sound of the commotion, Alan was back downstairs, getting the bloke off me.” And her hand has gone to that mark on her arm.

“Oh, _Alan—”_

“James! Stop now. Imagine the paperwork they’ll have to go through to explain this one—the bloody incident form I have to contend with will be nothing in comparison to it.”

But she looks paler than usual. And quite exhausted for this hour of the day. And he’s suddenly assailed by the memory of her reaching up and deftly firming a knot in Robbie's tie against James’s own shirt-collared neck, in her kitchen before that press conference, smiling her amusement right up at him, seemingly in response to their height difference. Of how she’s not just opened her home with Robbie so willingly to him, but she likes to see him relaxing there and making himself at home too, sometimes even resting the soles of her feet against his thigh as he slouches down beside her on their sofa. He’s caught her looking at him curiously and seeming to enjoy his ease, any time that he takes being there with them a bit for granted.

And he’s ambushed by feeling quite murderous. He wants the relief of committing bodily harm to whoever took rough hold of her, abused their superior strength against her small frame and held onto her beyond how they had any right to do. Except that it was a relative. And the idiot of a PC, whose name Laura is also avoiding mentioning, was, James knows, simply following his governor’s call. So maybe having a strong word with Peterson, who should have come down to the PC at his post, would do for starters—“The brother’s still fucking lucky it wasn’t Robbie or I who were there. _Peterson’s_ fucking lucky that—”

Laura looks a little startled. “It was a momentary lapse of attention on his part, James, it could as easily have happened at one of your crime scenes too, yours or Robbie’s—”

“It could _not._ We wouldn’t let anyone _do_ that—to you—”

“He didn’t _let_ anything happen—James, this was _not_ my first day on the job. I’ve encountered enough agitated relatives over the years. I knew what was happening. The man was in shock.”

But he’d also grabbed her from behind as she’d crouched over the body, intent on her work, and she hadn’t been able to get him off her. It makes him feel almost ill. She’s looking at him, frowning, though, and this is not what she wants. James closes his eyes briefly and tries to take the cues she’s giving him. She doesn’t want a protector when she’s doing her job. She doesn’t want the slightest suggestion of one. She won’t even accept the idea that Peterson and the PC should have prevented this. She wants to play this down. Okay. Well, he can access a more casual frame of mind for now if that’s what she needs. If that’s how she copes with things like this. While he’s with her, anyway.

“You’re not to go raising this in the station with Alan, James.”

Fuck. She’s also learning how to read his more inscrutable looks in the way that Robbie did, early on in their partnership. Which had utterly disconcerted and then disarmed James at times, in that knowledge that Robbie had simply decided that James was somehow to be studied and known so well for no apparent reason except that—well, it was just what Robbie had done. James had barely known what to do with that realisation once he’d figured out what Robbie was at. And then at other times, like this, it’s not exactly convenient to be seen through. But if she really doesn’t want him to go any further with this—he wonders suddenly how Robbie copes when it comes to quashing the full force of his protective instincts in the face of Laura’s equally fierce independence. God knows, it can’t come easy to him.

He sighs, relinquishing his own very strong desire for vengeance here. “It _is_ adding insult to injury, isn’t it?” he offers. Although his voice still emerges quite brusquely. “Those forms. Literally.”

“Yes.” She sends him what’s still a distracted-imposter’s version of her normal smile. “I imagine you’ve had to fill out more than your fair share of them in your time.”

“The one after the arsenic poisoning was dire,” he confides, watching her. “I kept feeling ill having to think about it again.”

“Yes.” This time she twists her mouth in resigned displeasure.

“Tell me that at least used up one of his strikes,” James says suddenly.

That gets her attention. She’s surprised into an eyebrow raise of appreciation at him. “Good to see you’re still cognisant of the rules. Don’t worry. You’re ahead of him now. Alan used up all of his fairly soon after he got here.”

“Come here,” James says suddenly and he’s pulling her into his arms. He hopes she doesn’t feel that that’s too protective. Or inappropriate. It’s still partly to calm himself. And a part of him, observing this, is surprised. He wouldn’t have thought that he could initiate something like this. But all those gentle touches, some of them so casual, which have lifted and settled him ever since that night in November when she’d first guided him in his shock to sit on the couch between her and Robbie. They’ve made it somehow possible for him to do this, to be pulled by his instinct for once instead of listening to reason that would tell him to hold back. And his instincts can’t be that far off.

Because he could swear Laura leans into him for a moment. She must be more in need of comfort than she’s willing to acknowledge.

He catches sight of movement in the corridor.

Peterson, emerging from another doorway to the morgue, his head turning sharply across his shoulder, does a double take. Then he obviously comes to himself and jerks his head around to face resolutely front as he continues on. His back as he determinedly retreats makes James think about Lot’s wife and pillars of salt.

James releases Laura and they both watch his departure.

“Well,” says Laura eventually. “Robbie will be returning to all sorts of rumours, it looks like.” James doesn’t care. For one thing, it’s better that Robbie would be greeted with rumours that would amuse him than by any reminders about Laura being attacked—even though he’ll have heard it from her in more reassuring fashion before he gets anywhere near the station again.

And somehow he knows that Robbie won’t mind. He’ll be—well, he’ll be amused, yes. But James thinks of the grins he’s been getting from Robbie recently at odd moments—even the night before Robbie had left for Manchester when James, immersed in arguing with Laura about the merits of the film the three of them had just watched, had glanced at Robbie to find his eyes resting on them both, looking thoroughly contented. It had given James pause until Laura had muttered _And that ending was mangled from the book, that’s the word I believe you’re looking for, not adapted,_ and he’d turned indignantly back to her.

And James knows now, deep within him, that Robbie will be pleased. Christ, he’ll be pleased. Why would that be so true? Must be because he’ll be pleased that James would instinctively look after Laura—well, try to.

He’s rather lost, contemplating this new realisation, so that it’s Laura who makes the suggestion he’d been going to offer.

“Lunch?”

“If I take you to lunch, will you tell me how?”

“How what?”

“How Peterson used up his strikes. Tell me _all_ the details.”

 _“That_ would relieve your feelings?”

“Yes. Plus I’d be able to look over at him in senior staff meetings when he’s doing his cheery, patronising you’ll-learn-Hathaway expression at me. And I could just—think about it. But I wouldn’t tell anyone,” he says persuasively.

Laura looks torn between amusement and despair. “I’m not giving away any—all right, though, I suppose one of them certainly falls under the remit of gossip rather than professional disclosures. He took one of my lab assistants on a date a couple of years ago. It was open-mike night at the pub they landed up in after dinner, and he rather misread that she was not the type of woman who would enjoy her date spontaneously taking to the stage to croon an eighties ballad with the spotlight on her—”

This is far more than James had hoped for. “Which ballad?” he says avidly. “No, don’t tell me yet. I am _definitely_ taking you to lunch.”

“Sounds like an offer too good to refuse,” Laura acknowledges. She does look like she could do with getting out of here.

He grins at her. “Do you remember when Peterson asked _you_ out? Robbie was afraid you were going to succumb to his charms back then.”

“Oh, I’m fairly sure I’d have it in me to handle two DIs at once,” she says musingly, looking up at him.

James chuckles. “No better woman,” he agrees.

Laura looks at him a little longer. “Yes,” she says, approvingly.

He’s pleased to see that his joking remark has finally produced her most genuine smile of the whole conversation.

 

 

============================================================

 

“Good that you were there. She won’t admit it, but it shook her up.”

After he had ended his call to Laura, her carefully-downplayed tale of what had happened had hit Robbie afresh. And in Lyn’s quiet house with Jack sound asleep, but Lyn on a late shift and Tim still away, there’d been no-one here to share his agitated anger that Laura had somehow been put in that position. And then he’d reached for his phone again in relief, reached to make contact with someone else who he’d instinctively known would share his outrage. James, it had turned out, is working late, alone in his office.

“It wasn’t any problem,” James says now.

“I’m not thanking you,” Robbie says abruptly.

“You’re not?” comes a slightly confused voice down the line from Oxford. But it seems important to make this clear to James, how this part is, and it’s suddenly easy to just be direct about this in light of Robbie’s own stirred-up emotions.

“No. I’m not. Because I know you’d do that for her and you don’t need my thanks or my blessing. Just sayin’ I’m right glad you were there.”

“Oh,” James says, thoughtful. Then—“Okay,” he says, but Robbie could swear he can hear a smile in his voice as he takes this in. “We’re not allowed to have a go at Peterson, you know,” he adds, regretfully.

“Aye. I know. I’ve been told.”

“Which is a shame,” James says. “Because I could think of a few things—”

His voice becomes a little muffled as he settles into the conversation. Robbie chuckles, feeling rather better at having this unquestioning backup for his own distinctly uncharitable feelings towards Peterson at the moment. But he knows full well what James is at now. He’s suddenly able to picture him, tilted back in his desk chair in haphazard fashion, mobile phone cradled to his neck, and hands locked behind his head, as he simultaneously contemplates the ceiling and ways to subtly take vengeance on Peterson. Just like he used to propel himself back from his computer in their old office, considering his own angles on a case and offering up his theories to Robbie.

Robbie resists the urge to say _Sit up there, Sergeant,_ and says instead, “Tell me about your week, then.” And he settles back in one of the armchairs in Lyn’s living room as James starts to oblige.

Because added to missing Laura and the restlessness of wanting to get back now, and just see for himself that she is in one unharmed piece—he’s missed James too. He’s become that used to having James around more again so that when he pictures home he finds he’s often picturing James there. And there’s that hope, these days, which keeps surfacing from time to time, under that comfortable ease of having James around more again. There’s a rather restless anticipation he suppresses, letting himself look at James when James is distracted, debating something in animated fashion with Laura, and contemplating the prospect that, maybe, just maybe, James would somehow find it in himself to go further and let them both in that far—the mere prospect of it is undeniably intriguing Robbie.

It’s no wonder that, despite time with Jack being as enjoyable and exhausting as it ever is, it’s proving hard to settle in Manchester this week.

 

 

============================================================

 

The slowly dropping temperature gauge in the car was only to be expected, Robbie’s supposes, considering it’s so close to Christmas now. It’s a crisp, clear night at least. But he's glad to be back properly indoors at last, met with the welcome relief of home. He removes his coat and abandons his luggage beside the coat rack in the front hall. The lights of the television, the firelight and a couple of the lamps are shining across the glass panels that are set in the wooden-framed doors leading into the living room. Doors that are kept closed on evenings like this to keep in the warmth.

He can see, from the obscured view afforded to him, that Laura is still up, despite the lateness of the hour. The murmur of the television swells as he pushes one door open.

But there are two blond heads in the firelight’s glow. Laura, her head turned in surprise towards him. And James, Robbie sees, as he closes the door gently behind him. Fast asleep. With his head on a cushion that’s propped against Laura’s thigh. With a casual long-sleeved shirt on, knees hunkered up a bit, his denim-clad legs tilted against the back of the couch and his stockinged feet propped up against the arm rest.

Robbie stoops carefully to kiss Laura, aware of the need not to disturb James, whose face is still turned towards the television, that’s showing some travel documentary Laura has on. Robbie’s rather pleased to find that he’s still kissed as gently, but with as much satisfying interest as ever, regardless of the questions doubtlessly forming in Laura’s mind at his unanticipated return right now. It’s almost as if she hasn’t got a young, blond ex-sergeant of his already effectively lying with his head in her lap, he reflects in amusement, straightening up and shaking his head at the oblivious James.

Laura, eyeing him now, is not quite as amused, though.

“Thought I’d just drive back tonight instead,” he says, casually pre-empting her.

“Oh, I _knew_ you gave in too easily on the phone last night!”

“Ah, now. They didn’t need me any longer in Manchester.”

Her eyebrows express her disbelief. He wasn’t due back until the day after tomorrow, after all. Until he’d clumsily tried to express to Lyn early that morning the feeling he’d been left with that, while he knew Laura was all right, and she’d certainly given his suggestion about coming back early short shrift on the phone, he’d just wondered if—and Lyn had looked at him, her eyes softening and said, _Of course, Dad,_ and promptly commenced arranging by text some complicated swaps with nurse friends of hers that had seen her getting home earlier this evening and Jack’s childcare covered for the following day.

Laura’s angling her head to send an assessing look up at him. “And the reason you didn’t tell me you _were_ coming back tonight, then?”

“Maybe I just wanted to surprise you,” he offers. “Didn’t know you had another man here in me place, of course.”

She’s neither fooled nor distracted. _“Robbie—”_

“Shush now, don’t wake James,” Robbie says innocently. “He must be worn out.” Probably worked far too late last night then, despite Robbie chiding him at the end of their rather long natter. Even though James had said he’d head home shortly, the stubborn sod.

Laura’s demeanour changes. “It’s been an eventful couple of days overall, I suppose.”

“Why? What else happened?”

“A student,” she says. “And judging by the time I got woken at, I think James had barely got to sleep and he was roused. At least I’d had an early night. And the investigation part was all over relatively fast—it did turn out to be suicide. It was just less evident at first.”

Robbie studies her. “So you haven’t had the best day either.”

“I’m not the one who has to tell the parents, am I?”

“Ah, Christ.”

“It was Lizzie’s first time having to sit in on that particular type of interaction, breaking that news, so I think he was very focused on how it might hit her.” Robbie remembers taking a young Sergeant Hathaway with him to gently break the news of a sudden death to the parents of a young student early on their partnership. And that utter silence beside him in the car on the way back to the station. Then he remembers Adam Tibbit, years later at the very end of their inspector-sergeant days, and what that had done to James.

“Was it a young lad?” he asks.

Laura looks at him in a way that tells him she hasn’t forgotten either. “Yes, as it happens,” she says eventually. “There were—some similarities. Which is why I sought him out at the station. Where he was settling in for an evening with case files, as far as I could see. And he was busy convincing himself he was okay…honestly, Robbie, I think he’s so used to doing that—but he was relieved when I appeared.”

Robbie gently raises James’s legs and drops down at the end of the couch, landing up with James’s calves resting across his own thighs. He doesn’t reckon James will mind too much. And he can’t really stop himself from following the urge to add to Laura’s comforting of James. The contrast from last time—when Robbie had tried unsuccessfully to get James to come and spend the evening with him and Laura in the early days of their relationship, as James, unbeknownst to Robbie, had begun to pull right away from everything and the job itself in the aftermath—it isn’t lost on him.

“And he came back here with you?”

Her eyes meet his. “We were just fine, love,” she says softly.

Robbie leans back against the couch and puts his hand up to cup her cheek for a moment, studying her.

She gives him a slight smile. “He hasn’t been talking much or anything,” she tells him. “He was dead on his feet. He doesn’t have much of a reserve when it comes to missing more sleep, does he? We sat down here after dinner and he kept sliding down and startling back awake. I tried telling him it was fine to stay but he kept muttering about going soon. And then once he grasped that I really meant it was okay to put his head down, he mumbled something about five minutes…that was an hour ago.”

Robbie feels something unfurl within his chest. The warm weight of James’s legs is not unwelcome and James’s face is quite open in sleep. He wonders how much more of a relief it would be again if he was the one passing his hand through James’s hair like that, tousling and smoothing as Laura is doing. He gets the feeling she’s just recommencing what she was at before his arrival. James has grown his hair out again, Robbie realises. It’s that bit longer now, softening the angular planes of his face.

“He seemed to like that,” Laura tells him, tracking Robbie’s gaze. “Just before he dropped off. It seemed to relax him.”

James mutters something utterly incoherent to Robbie’s ears.

“Okay,” Laura tells him, agreeably.

“What was that?” Robbie enquires, curious.

“Who knows?” She raises her eyebrows. “Must be dreaming. The subconscious working of James Hathaway’s mind—that’d keep a whole analysis of psychologists busy.”

“Would he have stayed, in the end, d’you think? Without me here? Slept upstairs?” Robbie asks, pitching his voice a little lower. He shouldn't disturb James by talking further, really, but he's intensely curious about this. He somehow knows that staying overnight when it’s just Laura who’s here—that would be a step he can’t see James taking. However much Laura tried to reassure him. Otherwise, James would undoubtedly have found some excuse to stay here last night, to keep an eye on her after her own rough day.

Laura just grins at him now and annoyingly says nothing.

But Robbie’s words seem to penetrate James’s slumber because he stirs slightly, muttering querulously at Laura, “Stay here.” It seems to be a command from the depths of his sleep aimed at her and the threat to his loose-limbed drowsing comfort. Robbie can't quite suppress a chuckle. James’s eyes drift open and stare at him, unfocused. “Hello,” he says eventually, without moving.

“Hello yourself,” Robbie tells him.

“What’re you doing here?” James asks.

“I live here, remember?”

“Okay,” James agrees.

Laura laughs. “I'll go and make tea,” she says.

But James’s hand reaches up to take hers before she can evict his head from her lap. He gazes up at her. She smiles straight down at him. Robbie shakes his head at them both and lifts the barrier that James’s legs form since James himself doesn’t look too capable of responding to simple instructions just yet. He goes to put the kettle on. It’s only when he’s looking out mugs that it occurs to him that if James had come straight from work that means he’s started at some point to keep more casual clothes to change into here. Not clothes for work, for necessity, but clothes just for himself to relax in.

He takes his time making the tea.

All that worry over James for years and seeing him now look for and take a bit of what he needs. And Laura being the one to give it to him. It warms Robbie in ways that he couldn’t have suspected he needed.

While the kettle roils away, almost there, Robbie goes to the doorway for another look. He’s not sure James will be drinking the tea. His eyes have drifted shut again. But Laura smiles over at him. A long, steady, full, soft smile.

===

Maybe Laura had had a point when she’d said that sleep can be harder to come by when you’re overtired, James reflects as he rises from the swing. Even the garden has failed to soothe him into a more restful state tonight.

He’d seen her a while earlier, inside making tea in the kitchen, and had almost wished—but she and Robbie must have been catching up after his week in Manchester, of course. James shouldn’t really be here at all tonight. It had just been so nice to open his eyes, still half-asleep, and see Robbie there. While Laura’s hands nursed his head.

But he really shouldn’t have stayed.

As he passes under the vent, he realises they’re still awake too.

“You’re better at that,” Robbie is asserting. “You know you are. And it’s not something that needs to be addressed right now, anyway. But I don’t reckon I’d manage it all that well—”

“Cooking?” James would enquire, ultra-seriously, if he were, as Laura had done, returning to Robbie, climbing into bed with them to have someone to talk to in his restless state, someone to lie against until he found himself growing drowsy and relaxed—he recollects himself and makes for the door.

“But this needs to come from you,” Laura’s voice, adamant, follows him. “And you can’t leave it much longer.”

That—surely can’t be about him this time. But once he returns to bed, he realises that this time they’re definitely arguing. Robbie sounds a bit wrought up tonight. His is the tone that tends to rise and fall with the whatever-the-hell they debate in lieu of pillow talk. Laura’s, that higher tone and purer pitch, is steadier than him tonight. The two voices twine their way together and apart, working their way into James’s own increasingly confused thoughts as he tries to push away that foolish, ridiculous urge to go in and join them.

It’s rank ingratitude, after all they’ve done, opening their home to him, to be thinking about either of them like that.

Laura, because he had lain with his head in his head in her lap tonight, small, deft hands in his hair, occasionally giving an absent-minded stroke to his cheek as he’d drowsed off. And because she’d come to find him, knowing somehow, something of the day that he’d just had and of his private struggle. And because the last couple of months she’s just gradually bypassed most of his defences and he’s not even sure how she’s done that, but it’s left him wanting more of her touch in a way that, when he’s fully alert and himself, he’s starting to feel stabs of guilty disloyalty about.

And Robbie because—well, with Robbie, it’s the same helpless situation it has been for years, only getting to be more acutely so now again. Robbie he longs for because he’s Robbie.

James has no right to any of these private yearnings, either way. He has to stop relying on them both so much. Because whatever about their odd lack of need for boundaries around them as a couple, he needs to start pulling back if those treacherous thoughts are still there in the broad light of day.

And he can’t really deceive himself much longer that they’re not.


	5. Chapter 5

Laura, due to hold an early supervision session with her current batch of students, leaves early for work the next morning, giving breakfast at home a miss in favour of getting up a little later. She often does that now when James is here. Leaves Robbie to have breakfast with him while she takes what she calls the perfect excuse to indulge in a cappuccino and croissant from the coffee cart in the hospital. To ease the pain of an early start on winter mornings, as she cheerfully puts it. James, arriving downstairs just as Robbie is kissing her goodbye at the front door, skirts around them awkwardly, murmurs politely in response to their good mornings and disappears in the direction of the kitchen. When Robbie joins him there, he’s already putting the kettle on.

Robbie heads for the cupboard to extract plates for toast as James attends to the coffee. It’s a well-practised peaceable morning routine, both of them moving around each other, anticipating the rhythm of the other’s movements fairly automatically, as they listen to the radio. James provides amiable company and throws in the odd wryly amusing comment, as is his wont. Robbie could do with the ease of it just now.

He puts a hand on James’s shoulder in passing, as he’s become accustomed to doing in the narrower part of the kitchen. But this morning James stiffens under his touch.

Robbie shoots a glance at him. He doesn’t look great today. “How’d you sleep?” he asks.

“Fine,” James tells him. A clear untruth. Laura had told Robbie she’d seen James out in the garden last night, and God knows what time he’d come back in. Neither of them had heard him, engrossed as they were in their own debate.

Robbie looks at him again. He’d thought they were past this bit, that at least James’s problems with insomnia were clearly out in the open now. Now that he’d been letting Robbie or Laura do the bits they could to ease things for him in the worst of his wakeful nights when he’s here. Like that swing. Not that James had seemed to grasp that that was really for his benefit. Or his music. Which, come to think of it, Robbie hadn’t heard at all last night. Surely he’s not returned to the unnecessary solitude of his headphones? He does look quite drawn this morning, though. And he’s not the only one to have had a restless night, this time.

When James had finally woken a second time, yesterday evening, the tea Robbie had made for him long since cooled, he had come sharply alert and had seemed flustered to have found himself lying on their couch like that, raising his head immediately and apologising to Laura.

Laura’s best efforts to pacify him in his embarrassment hadn’t quite seemed to work. It had bothered Robbie. He’d recognised this from James, James’s backing off like that, and it had begun to nudge in unwelcome fashion at the contentment Robbie had been feeling, just watching the two of them. And it turned out that Laura, to Robbie’s dismay, had seen it too, making it harder to dismiss as momentary defensiveness on James’s part. As old habits dying hard. Laura’s arguments, once they were in bed, had only let that heavy feeling of foreboding gain more ground, try as Robbie had to evade her, to assure her that things were fine as they were just now.

Because James, a natural presence in their kitchen some mornings now, is becoming a central part of this home without actually grasping his own importance. And Robbie is heartsore with the worry of it this morning.

It seems impossible to tell James what they want with him and impossible to lose this with him now, both, and yet Laura makes an undeniable point when she says that they can’t wait much longer. That James will start to feel guilty, now that he’s let them in so far. Guilty because he’ll want more. She’s right about that. She just doesn’t grasp how helplessly guilty James gets and how badly he reacts and pulls away when he does. And that’s the whole problem. She’s never experienced that unreachable withdrawal of James’s turned against herself, the way that Robbie has. She thinks they can manage it if James can’t handle finding out what they want from him and tries to pull back in response.

Robbie, based on past experience; of James nearly losing his life in a house on fire; of James telling him he’d hand in his notice, in a torment of self-reproach, standing on the lawn of a country estate on a still and frosty early winter’s morning much like this one; of James actually resigning, after Adam Tibbit, and physically leaving, making himself uncontactable—Robbie isn’t half so sure. And Robbie’s own guilt over failing to see all that was going for James around the time of that last one, and handle it better—it isn’t helping much either.

He realises he’s gazing at James rather despairingly. “What?” enquires James, pausing, holding the cafetiere, freshly swilled with boiling water as he insists on doing every time, claiming that _It retains more heat then, so the hot water gets more of a chance to draw out the full flavour of the grind._ Tastes the exact ruddy same to Robbie either way. And that’s without even starting on James’s odd notions about calling coffee a _grind._

Robbie shakes his head in exasperated fashion, letting James assume that this recurring trigger for enjoyable early-morning bickering is the source of his frustration. “Put an extra spoon in there,” he tells him.

“I forgot you take it stronger now.”

“I don’t, usually.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” James says, nodding appeasingly, the cheeky git. And what’s Robbie meant to say? I need stronger coffee on the mornings after you stay over. I get less sleep. Because Laura is always prompted into talking about you.

He can’t raise this and risk what they’ve finally established with James, but it’s rapidly dawning on him now that, despite all his protests to Laura, nor can he leave it be any longer. Because something is bothering James, too. Robbie can feel it like he can always feel that restless pull of anxiety he gets when James starts to draw away from him.

“Maybe make it two extra spoons,” he says helplessly.

The smirk is there now. But there is something worrying at James, holding him back from Robbie underneath it. His eyes are troubled. “Of course,” he says.

“I’ll be in later this afternoon,” Robbie says suddenly. Maybe he can get James out for a pint after work and just try to get out of him what’s at him. Before it takes any further hold in James’s mind. Because this could still be about James coping with yesterday’s events in work and that case which wasn’t really a case, but a pure struggle for James. Or maybe, judging from the way he’s holding back from any casual touch this morning—it’s not.

“You’re still on leave,” James points out.

“I’ve a couple of things I want to follow up on, though.”

 

===

 

Robbie can’t exactly deceive himself that James looks pleased to see him when he raps on the open office door later that afternoon, but he heads on in anyway and closes the door behind him for good measure. Because he’s just had a stroke of luck that may sort this out and get things back on track. He hopes.

“You’re coming to us on Thursday, aren’t you?” he asks, leaning one shoulder against the door. It’s exactly a week to Christmas now.

But James, searching through a stack of papers on his desk, stops and slowly looks up at him, his face rather blank. “I don’t know if I’m working.”

“You’re not.” Robbie tells him.

“How do you know that if I haven’t seen the rota yet?”

“Have me sources,” Robbie says, grinning at him. James frowns back at him. Robbie relents. “Innocent said to tell you.”

Robbie had gone in for a word with her on an unrelated matter. And as he’d left her office she’d glanced up from the next task she’d already started to peruse and asked him to _Tell James his leave over Christmas has been cleared, would you, Robbie?_ And judging from the thoughtful look that had briefly taken up residence on her face as she’d remembered to deliver that message, she’d been pleasantly surprised that Inspector Hathaway had asked for this and gone to the trouble of making a formal request for leave, as opposed to simply taking the luck of the draw with the rota.

Robbie had been thoroughly relieved.

His step had quickened as he’d approached James’s office at this evidence that James understood that he’d be expected, of course, by Robbie and Laura, and had made sure he wouldn’t be on call. Robbie can’t remember James ever actually applying to get leave this time of year before.

But the mention of Christmas doesn’t seem to have gone down too well now. Robbie studies him as James shifts his position in his chair, reaching to draw a form towards himself. Then he goes over to perch on the side of James’s desk, looking down at him. James frowns at the form and worries with his teeth at the side of his thumb, which looks as if it’s been getting a fair bit of abuse today.

“I asked because of Lizzie,” he says eventually, looking up. “She seems to have landed a Christmas shift back in Leeds the last few years and she’d be unlikely to get time off this time of year when she’s so new to our nick.”

Oh. So James had just been easing his sergeant’s way by taking leave himself. But there’d be no need for him to look so uncomfortable if that was his only reason. Maybe he’d still also privately hoped—Ah, hell. They should just have asked him, properly, before now. But right up until late last night Robbie had just assumed they were all on the same page here, that James would know, of course, that he was expected. He should have faced up to what he’d learnt years ago, even if it sometimes makes him oddly frustrated to acknowledge. James doesn’t take much for granted.

Things had just been going so well, though. It had felt like they’d managed to get James used to accepting that he was cared for. Which is making this so-sudden turn around today, now becoming more and more evident in James’s strained demeanour, both confusing and dispiriting.

“Shouldn’t you check with Laura before you go issuing invitations, anyway?” James asks into Robbie’s silence.

“No,” says Robbie, briefly, still thinking.

James looks up at him, picking up that something is wrong now. He leans back in his chair but it’s not making him appear very relaxed. “This isn’t like the executive decision you made when you decided to jump at the chance to take a break from your retirement, is it?” He’s making an effort to gently mock Robbie. To avoid this topic when he still hasn’t answered Robbie’s invitation. And to get things back on an even keel between them. “And you omitted to let Laura know? Because I heard your dinner may have landed up in a canoe that time.”

How can he not know? How much he’d pulled Robbie back to the job? If Innocent had known that would happen, if Laura had seen what had happened there, and, most of all, after these last few months working together as partners again, how can James still not see how much of that had been about him?

Robbie’s eyes meet his and he sees James’s rising unease. “I didn’t just come back for a break from my retirement,” he tells him abruptly. “Innocent said—well, I was worried about you. Thought you needed me to—”

James stiffens and comes more upright. “I don’t need—” He stops suddenly, closes his eyes briefly and starts again, down an entirely different track. He looks like something is causing him pain. “You’re very kind,” he says. “Both of you have been just—so kind. But you really should have Christmas to yourselves.”

“What? No. Come on.”

“And I should really see if anyone with family commitments needs me to cover the day itself.”

“James. No.” It’s so resoundingly James, as he has been over the years, staying that bit apart and not expecting to be part of what others experience, that Robbie feels despairing. “You shouldn’t be by yourself. There’s no need for you to be. Not when we’re there. Just—”

But the reference to his solitude seems to have stirred something further in him. Something in the set of James’s jaw tells Robbie that they’re approaching dangerous territory here but in broaching this at last they seem to have set off down a path that neither of them can quite turn back on. “There’s no need to _worry_ about me,” James says and then makes a visible effort to deliver the last words with a tone of casual conviction. “I’m fine.”

“That’s not going to cut the mustard with Laura.” Robbie tries to enlist his invisible ally, wishing she was here to somehow help turn this back in the right direction. “You being fine won’t do, you know, she wants more than that for you, we both do. James—”

“Well, tell her I’ll get right onto that. Increasing my happiness quotient. Just for her.” He probably would too, despite the tone, if he only knew how. And right underneath the pure snippiness there’s also just pure bewilderment as something in James tries to rise to the surface and he battles it back down. “Neither of you are responsible for—I don’t _need_ you to be so—”

A sudden memory hits Robbie, watching him struggle. Of trying, in a different time and place, at a table across from James outside a pub, a few years back, to clumsily get it across to James that he needed to open himself up to finding a partner, needed someone in his life. James had looked stricken. Almost as if he’d taken that as a blow instead of the encouragement that it was meant to be. It was a look that had stayed in Robbie’s head, like a piece of evidence that didn’t fit what he thought he knew to be true on a case. Until, as he recalls it again, seeing a shadow of that look flicker for a moment across James’s features, he sees now how that moment might have been for James. Coming from Robbie.

“Look,” he starts, reaching out to put a hand on James’s arm, needing to clear this up before it gets worse and James retreats yet further, and not caring if they are in the office. But the setting can’t be ignored any longer. There’s a rap at the door and Peterson’s sergeant is visible through the window to the corridor. Bugger.

James gently shakes off Robbie’s hand and goes to take some message. Robbie gets up off the desk and stands, waiting. He has an ominous feeling here and this had really better be about a dead body—or any case that’ll involve Robbie rather than something that’ll take James away from him. But it’s not.

When James turns back to him, he’s safely withdrawn behind that polite mask now, even if his eyes are still showing a weight of confusion at what’s somehow transpired between them here. At his belief that Robbie and Laura feel sorry for him, that they think he just needs their support, and that that’s what’s being happening over the past two months, since he first came to them in distress that Friday night at the start of November.

“Have to go,” he says, courteously.

“James.”

“No.” And he’s somehow out in the too-public space of the corridor, calling for Lizzie, drawing on his coat.

And that’s the last Robbie sees of him for a while.

 

 

============================================================

 

They’d been meant to go further afield tonight to see a film at Oxford’s independent cinema. With James. Who has now texted a vague excuse. After yesterday. Between the forecast for snow this evening and a generally dispirited feeling, Robbie, on impulse, has suggested to Laura that they give going into the city centre a miss and just go out for a quiet meal locally instead. He hasn’t had a real opportunity to tell her about what’s happened. But nor has he had the heart to have that conversation with her until he has to. Laura has been overwhelmed in work, home very late last night and leaving very early this morning. More genuinely unavailable than James, Robbie reckons, regardless of whatever James’s brief responses to Robbie’s texts seem to imply.

Robbie will be keeping on with those texts. Even if they can only take the shape of fairly neutral enquiries just now about what James thinks he’s up to, missing a Friday night when he’d only been let off his turn to cook because of that film? Even if going back to the days of James’s vague evasions in response feels almost painful now. But James needs to face up to just how much he’s welcome with Robbie and Laura, in whatever shape or form he’ll accept that relationship. Even if he has trouble seeing that. And one thing’s for sure. If he thinks he’s getting out of spending Christmas with them, he’s got another think coming.

Laura, Robbie had supposed, could believe that the reason why James has cancelled on them tonight is actually to do with work. But when Robbie had made that suggestion that they just ditch their original plan and go for a more low-key evening, she’d just looked at him for a long moment and then said, “Okay, Robbie.” And she’d suggested they try that restaurant, then, that had finally opened last week, next to their local pub, and then gone to get ready without raising any further questions. Which, come to think of it, must mean she’s worked out that something is up from Robbie’s demeanour, or she would have pressed him further on the walk here. Instead of just tucking her arm through his and telling him about her day.

It’s anything but quiet when they arrive. There’s a cheerful swell of noise when they enter out of the sharp cold. But it turns out they can still be squeezed in, without a booking, even this last weekend before Christmas. They’re given one of the side tables on a wooden platform, up a few steps. And there’s another table between them and the glass balustrade to the main restaurant floor. So it’s not until they’ve finally managed to order, and the couple beside them take the opportunity to grab the rather hassled waiter and ask for their bill, only to be directed to the till, that their departure clears Robbie’s view of the room.

He has to acknowledge that it’s nice here. It’ll turn out to be a handy addition to their locality. They’ve kept the character of the old building well. The lighting manages to hit the right level of brightness while still being soft. The inevitable Christmas decorations are restricted to centrepieces on each table, small candles flickering in intricate stained-glass holders, the patterns of coloured light reflected in the gleaming, polished wood of the table top. The underlying music is something on the light classical end of things. And it all seems to have hit the right note for most of the customers here tonight. The overall atmosphere is one of cheerful, celebratory enjoyment.

Even if it makes Robbie wish this particular evening for a quiet pint in a quieter pub.

Laura still hasn’t said much yet, although she’s glancing at him again, as she has been even while they’d ostensibly been focusing on menus. But this time her focus skates off Robbie, her attention caught by something at the side of her vision.

“Look. Who's. Here,” she says slowly. Robbie turns his head.

It’s James. With his back to them, and oblivious to their presence, but unmistakeably him. His head is cocked at an angle and he’s nodding in response to whatever the young woman opposite him is saying to him. There’s a set of tension, though, in his shoulders, belying his apparently relaxed, attentive demeanour.

Bloody hell, he’s on a date.

“Robbie,” says Laura thoughtfully, without taking her eyes off James. Oh, hell. “When you said that you’d tried to talk to him but you’d had to back off—what exactly did you say to him?”

“I was going to talk to you about it properly now,” he admits. “And this is probably not as bad as it sounds,” he assures her in advance as her gaze narrows at him.

Her eyes certainly widen as he relates his interaction with James.

“All right. It is as bad it sounds.”

But she doesn’t seem to think he’s mucked it up in the way that Robbie has been left feeling he had.

“I think the damage had already been done,” she says consolingly. “From what you’re saying, he was already starting to pull right away from us, and whatever you’d tried to say to him—he wasn’t about to let you coax him back when he’s afraid we’re feeling sorry for him. Although…” But she stops, dismissing some other thought.

“What?” he asks.

“Just—well—in the _office,_ Robbie?”

Robbie shakes his head in frustration. “It all just kind of crept up and ambushed us.” Both of them, Robbie thinks. With their own churned-up thoughts and worries slipping to the surface at last. And the question of Christmas had somehow just escalated the whole thing. “I don’t think it was the setting that was the problem, anyway. That just gave him a handy escape route.” Although James would doubtless have found one anyway.

He looks across at James, who’s nodding carefully away again. It should be churlish to mind. If James, more ready to let someone else in now, has done so. But, Christ, he’s such a contrary sod. You try and encourage him for years to do something like this and then soon as you bloody well don’t want him to, he turns right around and starts pursuing this. All the same—

“Maybe if he has something going on with someone we should back off and let him try.” Even if voicing it aloud causes a heavy press of loss to take up residence within him. “If that’s what James wants,” he says, struggling. “A straightforward relationship with a woman. Instead of what we’re offering.”

“Because he doesn’t know what we’re offering,” Laura says, looking at him in disbelief.

“Aye, and don’t you think that if he did—he might run a mile.”

“So, we—what? Let him go gracefully? I will _not._ Well—not unless he actually understands and _then_ turns us down.”

Robbie studies James’s date and then what he can see of James. “They don’t look like they know each other that well, I suppose,” he says. Not if James’s posture is anything to go by. At least this isn’t something James has had going on for a while without mentioning it, then. “I hope it’s not someone he met on the case,” he says, expressing the thought as it comes into his head.

Laura’s look at him suddenly tells him that she’s well aware this is verging on hypocrisy. “I hope it is,” she says. “Then she won’t last.”

“That’s a bit—”

“The women the two of you met on cases were never good long term propositions. To put it mildly.” Robbie decides that’s really _not_ a chequered history he wants to get into with her. He hadn’t quite realised she’d known that much about that. Probably best to give the conversation a steer back to the matter in hand. Although the matter in hand looks like it’s just said something which hasn’t gone down well with his date, and has retreated into casting his own gaze about, suddenly finding the diners at the adjoining tables quite fascinating.

Lucky that he and Laura are angled well behind him, really. It’s James’s date they have a clearer view of. Christ, she has a bit of a death stare. Her current eyebrow-raise at James would rival Innocent on a thoroughly unimpressed day.

“She’s not happy,” says Laura, absently, casting a glance over there too.

Their meals arrive rather sooner than expected and Robbie finds, tasting his, that although it’s good it’s a different pasta dish than the one he’d actually chosen. “Teething problems,” Laura murmurs frowning at her own plate. “Think we’ve got another table’s order?” But then she just shrugs and starts to eat without much interest. Her attention is largely focused on monitoring events on the other side of the room. Robbie doesn’t care if his meal isn’t exactly what he’d ordered either. Despite the food looking decently appetising here, he’s not going to enjoy dinner overly much. He can’t sit and watch James with someone else now.

“How d’you think it’s going?” he asks, after a while.

“Does that look like a date that's going well, Robbie? I feel for your previous case-related conquests over the past few years if that's what you think a good date looks like…” Christ, part of her mind is still on that. She's looking thoughtful now, though, reanimated. “He’s overreacting to the whole idea he’s been getting too involved with us, isn’t he? That’s what he’s busy regretting doing over there.”

Ah, bugger. This is certainly an ordeal that James could have been spared, then. “Told you I shouldn’t have talked to him alone—” Robbie grumbles.

Laura grimaces. “I thought he really needed to hear it from you,” she confesses. “He’ll be more disturbed about taking risks in his relationship with you than with me.”

Oh. Robbie thinks of James with his guard down the other night, reaching up his hand to keep Laura on the couch with him. And the way James just looks at her sometimes now. “I wouldn’t be so sure,” he tells her.

She gives into a smile at him despite her frustrations. “Okay, maybe. But he’s also going to have more trouble believing that you really are attracted to him, than that I could be.”

“Aye, I know. Although—he’s the one over there with a woman.”

She looks at him. “I know your recent insistence that we should keep things as they were a bit longer isn’t to do with James being a man—”

“Do you?” Robbie prevaricates.

“Yes. I’ve seen the way you look at him recently. The way your eyes rest on him when he’s absorbed in something. I _know_ that look. I _like_ that look. You’re not feeling hesitant about that part of it, you’re dead curious now.”

“Seems like you’ve been taking the opportunity to watch me watching him,” Robbie grumbles.

She just keeps on looking on him, making him restless enough that he abandons the remains of his meal, moving it aside in favour of his wine. Then she pushes her own plate aside and leans forward, intent. “Robbie. _Why_ are you holding back like this? Tell me.”

“It’s been good the last couple of months, having him around, it’s been—” It’s been bloody great, actually. But maybe part of Robbie, deep down, has never quite believed that he could have this, have both James and Laura. And it’s just bloody difficult to risk James backing off now again in the way that Laura has never experienced from him, but James, Christ, he can make himself so utterly unreachable even while he’s still technically right there.

There’s pure affection in Laura’s eyes when he focuses on her again. “You’ve loved it, haven’t you?”

“Been good to see him letting someone in. Letting you in—”

“And you. You’ve loved getting even closer to him, having him there. And you didn’t know you’d want this quite so badly. Want James so much.”

“And telling him,” says Robbie, gruffly. “It’s bound to rock the boat.”

“Robbie,” she says, very gently. “He’s going to find it hard to risk things with you, too, you know. What you’ve got. And the way that the two of you have held things in your own pattern for years. But he’ll want this. I know he will. Yes, he may find it difficult to accept how much he’s wanted—”

“He could pull right back again,” Robbie says, his final doubt wrenched out of him despite her certainty.

“Or he could give in to us. So we’ll just show him. Take that one step more—together, okay? You were right that we should both show him together. Until he’ll give in to believing it.”

Robbie looks across to James, whose head is dipped a little as he listens to his date. She seems to be doing all the talking now. Judging from her hand gestures, anyway. The painfully tight set of James’s shoulders makes Robbie’s own shoulders tense uncomfortably in response. He wants to go over there, pull up a chair and settle down beside James. Natter away about inconsequential things to him until James starts to relax. He feels Laura’s fingers lace their way between his own. And it all suddenly feels more hopeful. He straightens up a little, stroking his thumb gently against the side of that hand in his, looking around this restaurant which is starting to feel more in keeping with his mood now. A welcome atmosphere of warmth and comfort.

“Funny that he chose here, isn’t it?” he asks, raising his eyebrows at her.

“It was in the Oxford Mail last week,” Laura tells him.

“The two of you and your ruddy reviews,” Robbie mutters. “This was bound to happen.”

“I wasn’t exactly intending that he’d take another woman here when I showed him that,” Laura says, annoyed.

Robbie chuckles. It’s still a damned strange choice for James to make, coming here. Practically on their doorstep. Oddly enough, it gives Robbie hope.

Neither James not the woman he’s with are talking much now. She’s playing with her phone, turning it round and round on the table in a slow, jerky circle. James’s foot is moving rather more rapidly, tapping nervously under the table. Robbie turns his attention to his wine, which is very good, he takes in properly now.

“She’s left,” Laura says suddenly. “They’ve finished their meal. They were obviously here in time for the early bird too. So they’d planned to go on somewhere else but now she's just left him.”

“She took a phone call a few minutes ago,” Robbie tells her. “She’s probably gone outside now to ring them back so she can hear them better.”

But, as Robbie follows Laura’s gaze, James’s hand goes up to his face, a brief scrubbing gesture that Robbie is familiar with.

“Sometimes I wonder if I really am with a detective—bag gone, pashmina gone—scarf, Robbie, scarf. She's programmed a fake call. Or had a friend call. Either way, our taxi rank will shortly be pleased to get her custom.”

“Has she just dumped James?” Robbie enquiries, indignantly, catching on.

Laura rolls her eyes at him and then turns her attention back to James in his abandoned centre-stage, affectedly nonchalant solitude. She frowns briefly at the back of his head. And then she gets up, removing a light wooden chair from that empty table beside them and pushing it behind her over to Robbie. Robbie settles it at their own table, between their chairs. Laura seems to be waiting for something, standing with both hands on the rail of the balustrade.

A lull comes at last in all the intertwined conversations rising up around them.

“Psst. _Inspector Hathaway,”_ Laura directs across at James in a loud, carrying stage whisper.

James swings half around in his chair, and does a perfectly timed double take which for some very odd reason makes Laura mutter what sounds like _Peterson_ to herself.

James’s startled gaze takes in Robbie. _Get over here,_ Robbie signals at him with a jerk of his head.

James rises, picks up what looks like a glass of his tonic water, and heads across to them, frowning, stopping right below Laura. She has the height advantage on him, for once, as they both regard each other in silence. It suddenly looks to Robbie like a bizarre version of the balcony scene. These two have obviously dragged him along to more than one too many modern interpretations of their Shakespearean plays.

“Are you both just tailing me now?” James enquires, looking up at her. “And aren’t you meant to be at that film tonight?”

“Aren’t you?” Laura asks with her own unique mixture of gentle directness.

There’s a slight colour in James’s cheeks that probably isn’t wholly due to the warmth in the restaurant. “Point taken,” he murmurs courteously to her.

Laura gives him a smile and retreats to the table. James is only a moment behind her, coming up the steps and wending his way carefully between the other tables to reach them.

He drops into the chair Laura unceremoniously angles at him with her foot.

Robbie moves his own wine glass across the table.

“I’m driving,” James tells him, focusing on the glass.

Robbie is that relieved to have James back here again, sitting between him and Laura at this small table meant for two, close enough so that James’s leg brushes against his, that he wants to drop his arm around the back of James’s chair, do something to get that strained look from his eyes. Apologise for what he’d clumsily done in helping to put that look there when James was already in turmoil yesterday. “So don’t,” he says. “Don’t drive home. Stay.”

James looks at him and then props one elbow on the table top, his hand against his cheek, regarding Robbie sideways. But he’s meeting his eyes, all the same. Robbie reckons he can see some of the wariness in those blue-grey depths dissolving in the face of his own gaze.

“C’mon,” Robbie says softly.

James gives a sigh of acquiescence that’s more wistful than anything else.

“Chateauneuf du Pape,” murmurs Laura, enticingly, moving Robbie’s glass a little closer to James again.

“Oh. Well. In that case,” says James. “Be rude not to.” Once he’s taken a proper taste, and seemed to find it more than passes muster, he sets it down within reach of both Robbie and himself. Robbie feels a slight constriction start to ease from his chest.

“She wanted to come here,” James says suddenly. “She read that review—”

“Of course,” Laura tells him.

James looks at them both and then just gives in to a grimace that makes Robbie grin in consoling fashion back at him. "Obviously,” James pronounces gloomily, “the only thing better than being found wanting before you even get to the halfway point of a first date is having an interested audience while it happens.” But Robbie reckons he's not that sorry they’re here now, all the same.

“And what was the second half of this evening’s program to be?” Laura enquires.

“We were going to go to a public lecture on Interdisciplinary Explorations on Social Shifts in Gender Depiction in the Arts.”

“Bloody hell, James. It’s a Friday night,” Robbie protests.

“It’s a perfectly reasonable way to start to explore shared interests with an individual who—”

Laura puts her hand on his arm, halting him as he starts to shift into back into full lofty defensiveness. “And do you still want to attend that?” she asks, looking hard at James.

“Oh, Christ, no,” says James fervently. “Not any more. She was dead keen to go. She might be there.”

Robbie can’t help it, he breaks out laughing. Laura is looking highly amused too.

James tries for a moment to maintain an injured demeanour but one side of his mouth is threatening to dip into a reluctant smile. “God, why is it so _hard?”_ he asks.

“Maybe it’s not,” says Laura. “Not as hard as you think.”

“It is for me,” he admits.

Laura takes a sip of her wine, without letting her eyes leave James’s face. Her other hand is still resting on James’s arm, but she’s spread her fingers so that the tip of one of them reaches beyond the cuff of James’s shirt, to his wrist. “Sometimes, what you want,” she says, rubbing that finger back and forth a little, “it could be right under your nose.”

Robbie hears a slight, irregular thrumming start in his ears.

And Laura slides her hand down that last bit, gently across James’s knuckles, and twines her fingers into his on the table top.

James’s eyes widen and he swivels his gaze, rather alarmed, to Robbie. Robbie, about to attempt an encouraging smile at him, changes his mind and tilts his head at him in a slightly challenging fashion instead. James stares at him. Then he twists his head sharply back to Laura who’s just gazing at him. She refastens her touch into a firmer clasp, laying her claim. James’s head jerks back to Robbie. He's going to get whiplash if he doesn't slow down. Mind, that's nothing to the speed at which his lightning-quick mind will be going trying to process all this and one of them had better step in before he becomes a flight risk—

“Come home with us?” Laura suggests casually. As casually as if it’s a normal dinner invitation after work that they’ve got him so used to accepting.

James looks down at his hand lying in hers on the table. “I—sorry, what?”

Laura gazes at him, all blue-eyed innocence, which nearly undoes Robbie’s composure altogether in the circumstances, his own nervousness making a chuckle rise up despite himself, at the guileless look of Laura in tandem with James’s current expression of incredulity. But he sees that there’s also a note of bewilderment seeping into James’s eyes at that and they need to get him out of here. So he rises, one hand automatically patting his pocket for his wallet. His other hand goes down to rest against the side of James’s face and he presses, gently, turning James’s gaze up to him.

“She leave you with the bill, lad?” Seems a fairly self-righteous gesture on the lass’s part to presume.

James swallows. “You want to pay for my date’s dinner?” he asks, after a moment in which he’s just stared up at Robbie. Well, it's not like Robbie knows the etiquette for this situation. If there is one. And, frankly, that’s the least of anyone’s concerns here.

“Aye,” he says, going for the simple option.

“Right,” James says faintly.

Robbie makes his way to the till, through the crowded, relaxed atmosphere of rather chaotic enjoyment now, skirting around the tables of couples engrossed in conversation and the larger groups who’ve split into smaller knots, pulling their chairs into post-dinner conversational arrangements that make his passage more hazardous, as he avoids trailing coats and straps of bags on the backs of chairs. When he’s finished settling up, he glances back over and catches sight of Laura, who has pulled her chair right beside James’s and is bending forward, talking to him. James’s eyes are fixed on her. Robbie’s struck by a sudden thought and detours to fetch James’s coat from his abandoned table on his way back to them.

As he approaches them, behind James, he can hear Laura, intent only on what she’s saying. “But he does, James. He does. Just come on, now. Trust me on this. Come with us.”

Robbie rests a hand briefly on the back of the chair and James turns to look up at him, so uncertain that it’s impossible not to resort to their own shorthand for reassuring him.

“Home, James,” Robbie says firmly. But he also holds out the coat, by its shoulders. When James rises, he helps him into it, settling it on him as James tries to look over his shoulder at him. And mixed in with the slightly sharp scent of whatever cologne he wears, he simply smells so ridiculously familiar from all those years right beside Robbie that Robbie is hopelessly drawn to touch him just a little longer. He smooths both hands over the shoulders of the coat. Settling James inside it too, he hopes.

The forecast has proved spot-on. It looks like just a dusting of snow on every surface, but it’s still coming down, deceptively lightly but slowly building so that there’s a proper crunch from three sets of steps on the pavement as they turn for home.

There are few cars and no other pedestrians in this quiet suburb, once they turn away from the main road onto the quieter streets that lead back to their house. And at this hour of the night, there are more trees lit properly now in the windows of the houses they pass than there had been when Robbie and Laura had made their way here a short couple of hours ago. More people returned to the shelter of their homes. It’s too dark to see the expression on James’s face as he walks on the other side of Laura. But he seems to stumble, his footsteps faltering for a moment in a pause, as they approach the corner of their own cul-de-sac. Laura’s head turns towards James in the dark.

The next time they pass under the glow of a streetlight, the flakes of snow dance and whirl lazily within the patch of light it casts, seeming to have gathered a bit more momentum. And Robbie sees that Laura’s hand is in James’s. James’s eyes meet Robbie’s over her head for an instant.

Christ, it’s like that long ago feeling of nervous anticipation walking your date home as a teenager and knowing that when you reached her door there’d be that moment—

Robbie finds his hand on the cold, frost-burnished metal of their gate and pushes it open enough for Laura and James to go in ahead of him, their footsteps darkening the untrammelled white of the driveway, under the exterior light that they’d had the foresight to leave on to guide their way back tonight.

By the time he’s closed the gate and reaches their front door, Laura has it open. She and James move inside and on into the dark warmth of the living room. Robbie secures the front door behind them as he hears Laura click on just the one lamp that leaves the rest of the room in shadow. Then there’s a second click and he sees, as he moves inside himself, that she’s gone over to turn on the lights of their own tree. The strings of soft plain bulbs, the ones that James had set-up so carefully, glow gently, bestowing a fragile but steady illumination on this corner of the room. And on James who has followed Laura and is left standing, irresolute, before the tree. When Robbie goes to join them, they both turn towards him. And James must brush against the wide lower branches when he makes a sudden move to reach for Robbie.

Because for every Christmas to come afterwards, Robbie will associate the scent of pine needles with that first kiss from James.

It’s the sheer, utter vehemence that takes him unawares. The urgency and the yearning as James gives himself over to him, his mouth warm and seeking, hard, against Robbie’s, as if he’ll only ever get this one chance. James’s hand presses against the back of Robbie’s neck, directing his face a little upwards, and Robbie, yielding to him, pulls him closer against him, and tips right over the edge.

But it’s the tender, tentative clumsiness of a final barely-there caress of James’s knuckles against Robbie’s cheek, when he finally retreats, his eyes seeking Robbie’s in a slightly desperate question, that finally tells Robbie that his heart has been captured beyond recovery.

When Robbie’s eyes move sideways, seeking Laura’s, she’s just watching them. She says nothing at all for a long moment as James’s eyes go to her too. Then she just inclines her head towards the staircase, reaching out a hand, summoning James.

As they reach the landing, their accustomed point for a parting of the ways, James hesitates one last time. Robbie presses a hand firmly to the small of his back to give him a steer. Laura, just ahead of them both, isn’t taking any chances, though. “This way, James,” she says. “Come in with us, now. Will you?”

“Yeah,” James breathes. And allows Robbie to prompt him gently at last into their bedroom.

===

James awakens to the sound of two voices, but this morning they’re not muffled through an intervening wall. They’re one on either side of him in this wonderful bed. And there’s the warm solidity of Robbie’s arm loosely cradling James’s ribs as James lies on his side. As his eyes blink open, he catches sight of Laura, lying facing him, her glance just flitting down to catch his. She breaks into a smile at him and James turns onto his back so he can look from one of them to the other.

“Ah,” says Robbie, pleased. “There you are.” And then he's shifting to sit upright, shoving a pillow comfortably between his back and the headboard, and his arm half-hauls James up to settle him against Robbie’s chest. James, his head dropping back against Robbie’s shoulder, lands up propped up at an angle against him. Laura is folding the duvet back. There’s no need for it, James realises. Not in the warmth of this room with the pipes in this old house gurgling comfortably, in such familiar fashion now, signalling that the heating is amiably working away. Not with all this glorious bare skin contact.

James is only in his underwear, as is Robbie, and although Laura has on something wonderfully silky-smooth and soft, some sort of chemise, James thinks, she’s shuffled further down the bed and settled herself across it, her knees bent upwards so it rides up, tantalisingly, again. And she props her head against James’s thigh. She had seemed to rather like his thighs, James recalls dazedly.

James’s limbs are so relaxed and gloriously heavy this morning that he doesn’t think he can move from this bed. But that’s sincerely not a problem.

The light in the room is that particular kind that tells of a world outside that must have been transformed overnight. Snow light. The frame of light that seeps around the edges of the curtains, spreading in wavering, underwater fashion against the walls, holds the white reflecting brightness that is the opposite of shadow. Robbie’s hold is firm across James’s own bare chest and Laura gives a sigh, tilting her head to gaze up at both of them.

And James is dazed and weighted down by their touches and ecstatic, almost giddy with it.

Just as, last night, he had had Robbie’s solid warmth beneath him and against him in the darkness, Robbie’s hands reaching for James, and his strong arms holding him. And Laura, her touches encouraging and emboldening James to bring further pleasure to Robbie, and then her hands pulling him over to her, and James losing himself again in the joys of her petite, lithe frame as he’d become hers too. Robbie’s hands had been firm and encouraging then and his voice had rumbled, almost growled, at James and as James had spiralled down into that darkness that came after the moment of oblivion, Robbie had pulled him back against himself, tethering him once more, his hold protective. It had taken Laura a moment to roll over to curl against James, he recalls with an utter satisfaction, a moment before her hand had reached across James to clasp Robbie’s arm. Because she had seemed rather stunned herself at the final culmination of all their small touches over the past two months.

She reaches back a hand to rub his inner thigh in approving fashion again now.

He isn’t sure for a moment if that’s an invitation to more. James is unsure his languid body can even respond to that yet. But she just smiles up at him and Robbie tightens his arm against him and James settles, one of Robbie’s hands coming up to stroke his hair briefly. When James tilts his head back to take stock, Robbie looks almost as happily dazed as James feels this morning. But he grins at James and his hold is sure and anchoring, just as sure as Laura’s grip on James’s hand had been last night when she’d reached for him on their silent walk home, as he’d faltered.

“You’re both sure about this,” James says. But more in wonder to himself than anything else.

Laura’s eyes seek Robbie’s. They exchange a glance.

She’s empathic. “Quite, _quite_ sure, James,” she says. “So let’s not have any second thoughts from you this morning. _Not_ after last night. Far too late to pull back now, you know, after you’ve shown us both what we’ve been missing out on from you.”

James stares at her. She grins at him unashamedly. “Are we clear?” she asks into his silence.

“She’ll only start expressing herself in Italian if you don’t listen to her,” Robbie tells him.

“She will?” James asks, intrigued.

“No,” says Laura. “Because James listens when I speak in English. Don’t you, James?”

“I wouldn’t actually mind—a bit of Italian—” James says, gazing at her.

She may see through his attempt to keep his tone neutral because she laughs in delight and her eyes go to Robbie.

“Sta nevicando,” says an unmistakably Geordie accent, startling James who tilts a wide-eyed face up at Robbie and then feels a slow smile of appreciation start to spread across his face.

“It is snowing,” he murmurs back in translation.

“So we’ll stay inside today, I reckon,” Robbie finishes, rather more prosaically. “How d’you say that?” he asks Laura, who shrugs, her bare shoulders pressing momentarily into James.

“I never got past the weather section, either,” she tells him. “I only dipped into chapter eight to get what I needed. But don’t worry, James, I’m _very_ pleased with your level of service.”

And she captures one of James’s hands and starts to flex her fingers over his, massaging gently. She’d liked his hands, too, James remembers. She’d guided them and laid her own much smaller ones over his and showed him, with her touch, exactly what she liked, and when she’d become more lost and her hands had fallen away, Robbie’s warm, larger hands had given James an occasional steer as to what she wanted.

It had never occurred to James to imagine how that could be, to have Robbie’s touch and low words spoken in his ear as he’d started to learn what brought Laura pleasure. And if it had occurred to him, many, many times over the years, what it would be like if Robbie held him against him, as he had done a little while afterwards, and kissed him so thoroughly and ardently and just as James had thought Robbie _would_ kiss—the reality of it and of what had happened next, when Robbie had slipped a hand down over James’s bare hip and then between his thighs—It’s no wonder this morning that James is so grounded and present in his own body, lying here with them both, a heavy comfort of satiation that he’d almost forgotten having entirely overtaken him.

“Well—one of us is going to have to go and get the papers from the corner shop,” Robbie qualifies. “Despite the weather. But other than that it’s a day for hearth and home.”

“Oh, I found a butcher in Oxford that _does_ have that uncured, low-salt bacon that was in last week’s food supplement,” James informs Laura, who looks delighted.

“You’re a prince and a scholar, James,” she tells him.

“He’s a git and a tosser,” says Robbie, indignant at this betrayal. “Low-salt bacon. The mere thought of it makes me blood pressure go up, so it’d be counter-productive anyway. Low-salt bacon,” he mutters. “Might as well make it vegetarian sausages and be done with it.”

“There’s a thought,” Laura muses, settling more comfortably against James. James, having shifted slightly to accommodate her, nudges his head back into the hollow of Robbie’s shoulder, suddenly secure in the knowledge that he can mock and irk Robbie to his heart’s content—and yet be held , held by Robbie, held like this.

He thinks of his difficulty in hiding from them how he had wanted Christmas here. And more. And how he’d desperately tried to pull back, these last few days, in all of his wretched guilt at quite how much he’d found himself wanting from them. And he’s now found out they weren’t about to let him. But how it had also been so hard to refuse them every time over the past two months, as it had all built to this. When they’d somehow just kept offering, step after step, things that deep down he’d found he wanted so much.

“D’you know that vent over there—it has strange acoustics,” he says suddenly. Robbie and Laura both eye it silently. Robbie’s hand, which has been raking lazily through James’s hair, tousling and smoothing, in a haphazard, casual, proprietary fashion; pauses.

They look at each other over James’s head.

“What did you hear?” Robbie demands suspiciously.

“Just—little bits,” he reassures them, keeping a straight face. “Snippets.” He’d heard just enough, James would like to fancy now, to maybe ready him underneath it all for this idea.

It’s a Saturday.

Laura is going to make breakfast and James will be the one to volunteer to get the papers from the corner shop. To take the chance to have a surreptitious cigarette. But also to walk through the crunch of the snow and the transformed world outside, as he’ll retrace their steps from the restaurant last night. And then he’ll return here to Robbie and Laura.

He thinks of that first Saturday morning in November, when the last of the leaves had fallen, of the first breakfast he’d shared with them both and now of the many shared Saturday breakfasts that are to come. Of not having to hold back from wanting them. Of the way they had quietly breached his defences, made a place for him here and let him see it was there, regardless. Because they had wanted to do this. Wanted him too.

“I suppose, speaking of bacon…” says Laura, raising herself up to sit on the edge of bed and starting to look around. In search of her robe, James thinks. Come to think of, there are various garments of James’s from last night, dropped on the bedroom floor from when they’d both tugged him in here in the darkness and divested him of his clothing.

But Robbie holds him back, against him, as Laura locates her robe and pulls it on, leaving the room.

“You all right, James?” he asks softly in James’s ear. James, wordless, nods against him, Robbie’s morning stubble rubbing gently against the side of James’s temple. He turns his head a little more, into Robbie, with a sigh.

They don’t get to lie there savouring that for too long.

“If either of you thinks that the way we’re celebrating this is leaving me to cook downstairs—” comes an indignant voice from the doorway.

James comes to his feet. When he bends to seek Laura’s mouth, his kiss is firm and he presses her right against him so that she raises up on her toes. Because her indignation at him is so familiar now, too. Because of all that he’s vaguely becoming aware that she’s somehow done over the past two months. Because after last night he wants more of this with her again already. And just because she’s gorgeous and he can. He feels her mouth turn upward against his when they stop. “I’ll make the coffee,” he mumbles against her lips. Neither Laura nor Robbie understand the importance of preheating the glass of the cafetiere with just-boiled water, after all.

“Oh, _you’re_ forgiven,” Laura tells him, pointedly, pulling back to look up at him. Her eyes are a little startled, but she’s certainly smiling now.

James delivers one of his best smirks over his shoulder at Robbie. But Robbie is looking at them both with undeniable interest. Then he reaches up a hand and pulls a surprised James right down on the bed again. James, sprawling in ungainly fashion across Robbie and the bed, finds himself being caught by those strong arms, levered half upright and then very thoroughly kissed by Robbie instead. When he comes to, Robbie’s hand brushes against his cheek, a brief, approving caress. Laura, James takes in as he opens his eyes again, is leaning against the headboard, right beside Robbie, smiling at James. Christ.

“Think I could do with some breakfast now, all right,” Robbie says equably. “You hungry, James?”

James, temporarily without more coherent thoughts, murmurs that _breakfast would be good, thanks._

It’s as they’re leaving the bedroom that Laura stops. Robbie has pulled on pyjama trousers and an old woollen jumper and thrown James his own robe, which smells blissfully of Robbie, soft-rough against James’s skin.

“How did you sleep, James?” Laura asks. And her voice is casual, but there’s a hope in her query and Robbie turns to study James too.

Last night, he had come back to wakefulness a few times as usual. But any time he’d stirred, there had been the sound of Robbie’s gentle snoring and Laura’s steady, even breathing. There had been two bodies there in the bed with him, an arm across him or a head against his shoulder. They must have stirred in the night, shifting their positions, reaching across James to find each other. And reaching for James, too, as he lay between them.

It had made the periods of wakefulness seem more like a blissfully contented daze than a disruption to his rest. It had also made them startlingly brief, as the line between sleep and wakefulness had blurred. So it’s very easy to meet their kindly scrutiny now and just tell them the unexamined truth.

He feels his features reach into an unstoppable grin, which makes them both start to smile in response even before he answers.

“Impossibly well,” says James.

_End._


End file.
